Keywords

1.1 The Scale of Music Studies

Scales are sets of spatial frames, abstractions or categories that denote the size, proportion, level, extent or hierarchical relations of phenomena. They are, like other frames, abstractions and categories, neither neutral nor natural but politically contested and actively produced through a range of political-economic, social and cultural practices. They are not just there. They are made. Foundational work by Neil Smith (1992, 1995, 1996, 2010 [1984]) and Sallie Marston (2000; see also Marston et al., 2005) has shed light on the multi-scalar system produced by capitalism, and on the role of complex and gendered patterns of social reproduction and consumption in the constitution and reconstitution of scale. The insights of this human-geographical scholarship have been fruitfully adapted by the anthropologist Anna Tsing in her various studies of scale-making projects, scalar ‘conjurings’ and (non-)scalability (Tsing, 2000, 2005, 2012). However, the project of understanding how cultural practices produce scale remains unfinished. Smith’s (1992, 1996) illustrative work on the scalar functions of specific conceptual art pieces has not been substantially built upon for other areas of cultural activity.

With this book I want to offer a deeper understanding of how scale is culturally produced. I hope to contribute, in doing so, to the research on scale and scale-making in the fields of human geography and cultural studies. I believe this to be an important area of research because I agree with Smith (1992, 62) that the production of scale is ‘a primary means through which spatial differentiation “takes place”’. I aim to make this contribution to what might be called ‘scale studies’ by focusing on music and asking: how does music produce scale? I choose music for two main reasons. First, because, as Kirstie Dorr puts it succinctly, ‘sonic production and spatial formation are mutually animating processes’ (Dorr, 2018, 3), and, moreover, because musicians are often expert practitioners of what Alistair Fraser (2010) has called ‘scalecraft’ (or ‘the craft of scalar practices’). Musicians demonstrate ‘the skills, aptitudes, and experiences involved in producing, working with, or exploiting geographical scale’ (Fraser, 2010, 334). I will expand on this point in the following chapters, but suffice to note here that musicians are both required to and skilled at working at multiple scales simultaneously, with the facility to produce (and reproduce) recordings and performances that may be heard and repurposed for different sizes of audience in different kinds of places, and to ‘conjure’ (to use Tsing’s [2005] term) the intimate and the universal, or the global with the personal. They must keep constantly in mind the scale(s) of their audience, or what Diana Brydon refers to as the challenges of ‘meaning-making across different scales of engagement’, each of which produces ‘its own scales of relation’ (2016, 43–44). Most straightforwardly, musicians pursuing professional careers are generally required to produce ‘scalable’ work (i.e. musical recordings or performances that can be reproduced and circulated in relatively stable formats). They are also involved in the kinds of creative, artistic practices that require sensitivity to the complex scalar textures and interconnections of the world—what Anna McCarthy (2006, 43) calls the ‘conjunctures [that] are formed between different “levels” of social life’. Musicians make aesthetic and lyrical choices about the scale of the themes and moods they express. Compare, for example, the intimate soundscape and whispered, breathy vocals of Olivia Rodrigo’s record-breaking hit ‘Drivers License’ (2021) with the more epic choruses of ABBA’s ‘The Winner Takes It All’ (1980). Both are in major keys, in the Western pop music tradition, between four and five minutes long, with lyrics focusing on the breakup of a romantic relationship, addressed in the second person to a former lover. But one sounds clearly ‘bigger’ than the other. This is in part because musicians may expertly deploy a range of performance, recording and production techniques to produce musical and vocal sounds ranging from the ‘very very small’ to the ‘very very big’ (Sofia Jannok quoted in Diamond, 2007, 27)—even when the volume at which we hear them remains the same—as well as specific musical methods for connecting and seguing between these. (I analyse some of these methods in the following chapters). Contemporary pop production software and practice involves working with ‘infinitesimal digital details’ (Reuter, 2022a, 122) and ‘interrelated macro-synthesis of sounds where adjustments multiply across microcosm and macrocosm’ such that artists like Billie Eilish are ‘constantly producing changing relations of nearness’ (Reuter, 2022b, 61; 66). Besides this, musicians are in the business of reinforcing hegemonic conceptions of the relationship between the particular and the universal, or in producing alternative imaginations of differently scaled worlds, which means their work can affect the real scales of social life. This ability of music to (re)produce scales is the central focus of this book.

The second reason for focusing on music here is that academic studies of music have both (a) most to gain from and (b) most to offer to a fuller conceptualisation of the cultural production of scale. Examples of (b)—where musicological studies can help with understanding scale construction—are highlighted in the following chapters. But first let us focus more closely on (a).

Scale frames music research more than other areas of cultural studies. Scalar categories have long been a stable feature of—and a vexing presence in—research in the broad fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies and music geographies. In his 1991 Cultural Studies article summarising ‘The Music Industry in a Changing World’, Will Straw highlighted the challenge of the ‘Global’ for musicology, as well as issues to do with ‘musical practices unfolding within particular urban centres’, ‘local musical cultures’ and ‘regional and national musical space’—all on the first page (Straw, 1991, 368). Terms like ‘local’ and ‘global’ have been near-ubiquitous in music research since such scholars as Lily Kong popularised them in articles with titles like ‘Popular music in Singapore: exploring local cultures, global resources, and regional identities’ (1996; see also Kong, 1997). Kong has of course criticised the historical musicological tendency to deploy scalar metaphors merely for ‘delimitating areas that share certain musical traits’ (Kong, 1995, 185). But the use of scale in musical analysis is often problematically connected to what Dorr (2018) calls ‘the “music in place” premise’, whereby ‘“the local” is offered as a spatial metaphor for the ostensibly culturally and geographically fixed or static landscapes of the non-West’—a proxy for the trope of ‘rootedness’ (Dorr, 2018, 4–5).

When used uncritically, these scalar frames tend to function as relatively stable categories or explanatory factors for how music works—or even, in the cases of ‘urban’ and ‘world’ music, to denote entire (and often entirely disconnected) genres.Footnote 1 Commonly, ‘local’ music (generally understood as confined to or inflected by some specific place) is purportedly counterposed with or affected by a ‘bigger’, ‘global’ music culture that circulates placelessly, perhaps via ‘extra-local (global) pipelines’ (see, e.g., Makkonen, 2015). We see this especially in studies of ‘local music policies’ in relation to ‘the global music industry’ that highlight the importance of ‘developing an infrastructure that can help and benefit from this local talent as it moves towards the global centre’ (Brown et al., 2000, 449; see also Watson, 2008). This account, of ‘local’ music places seeking to tap into a bigger ‘global’ music industry explains, for Brown et al. (2000), the status of a city like London as a ‘national/global music city’ as opposed to the local/regional centres of northern England. Music theory even uses scalar metaphors to describe ‘global keys’, ‘local tonics’ and ‘tonal regions’ (see, e.g., Lerdahl, 1988). These are just a few examples of how music is conceptualised in music research along a scale ranging, in Jennifer Lena’s (2012, 11) words, ‘from the hyperlocal to the global’, in a way that is barely related to literal spatial extent. Indeed, scalar terms and categories do a lot of work in music research, and my hope is that this book can help enrich musicology by encouraging a more critical engagement with scale.

Connell and Gibson (2003), in their helpful engagement with the ‘question of scale’, point in this direction. They acknowledge music scholars’ attempts to employ both conventional and unconventional scalar abstractions, before asserting that ‘more active terms are needed than “global” and “local” or variants such as “glocalisation”, which reify the status of geometric space over the dynamic conditions under which space is actively constructed and consumed’ (Connell & Gibson, 2003, 17). Some scholars have acknowledged that the scalar complexity of music makes it difficult to apply the terms like ‘local’, ‘regional’ and ‘global’ uncritically (see, e.g., Harris, 2000, 26). Conceptualisations of musical ‘communities’ and ‘collectives’ have had to address differing (re)definitions of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ (e.g. Shelemay, 2011). Arun Saldanha is one of many scholars who have attempted ‘to map both the “local” and “global” character of young people’s musical practices’ (2002, 341), but his account—whereby the ‘rich kids’ actively perform a politicised ‘global’ identity in relation to ‘the local other’ (ibid.)—is notably rich. Research on music ‘scenes’ has long grappled with scalar adjectives, sometimes juxtaposing ‘local scenes’ with ‘global networks’ (e.g. Dunn, 2016), or reasserting the significance of ‘regional music scenes’ and ‘local accents’ of music in specific cities in a context of ‘resistance to globalization’ (e.g. O’Connor, 2002), or using terms like ‘translocal’ to account for the spatial complexity of niche scenes, especially when the internet is involved (see, e.g., Kruse, 2010; Bennett & Peterson, 2004; Futrell et al., 2006; Taylor, 2012). ‘Glocal’ is deployed, too, especially to explain ‘local’ variations in ‘global’ genres. But even if a term like ‘glocal’ might help describe, for example, the ‘recontextualization of cultural forms through “local” appropriations of a globally acceptable cultural model’ in the world’s varied hip-hop communities (Morgan & Bennett, 2011, 181; see also Omoniyi, 2006), it does not explain why the local-to-global scalar system persists as a prevailing analytic lens. In fact, even in music research that makes ‘scale(s)’ the analytical focus, a relatively stable set of abstractions tend to be used (see, e.g., Westinen, 2014 on global, national and local authenticity in Finnish hip-hop). This is true even when the music being studied in fact explicitly challenges or unsettles the scale of the spatial units in which they are conceived, such as nations across state borders (Hamelink, 2016) and ‘nations within nations’ (Dunbar-Hall & Gibson, 2000). And even when scalar categories’ deficiencies are acknowledged, scales themselves, and the processes of their production and naturalisation, are rarely directly in focus. The question what does music do to scale? remains unaddressed.

What is required, following Tsing (2000, 347), is for music researchers to adopt ‘Scale as an Object of Analysis’. Music scholars should, I suggest, treat scales as open questions, and as phenomena potentially produced through musical practices, rather than as stable categories upon which to base, or with which to frame, other arguments. They should not only ask: which, from this set of spatial frames, should I use to contextualise this music? Instead, they should find it interesting and productive to ask: how does this music produce these sets of spatial frames? I propose, then, to study scales through music rather than scales of music. This means not using scales to analyse music but exploring music’s potential to analyse, use, subvert and produce scales. I seek a richer musicological analysis, and a deeper understanding of cultural-geographical processes more generally, by attending to how music harnesses, manipulates, contests and constructs the scales that have been more commonly used to frame and explain it.

This book focuses on four examples of scalar processes as practised through music. My own archival research, empirical fieldwork findings and musicological analyses inform the arguments I develop, but I also highlight existing work that has shed light on musical scale production. The different chapters address different genres, styles and forms of music, taking in live performances, studio recordings and historical descriptions of music in such diverse contexts as urban neighbourhoods, climate protests, antifascist demonstrations and colonial encounters. The examples may seem disconnected, but the idea is to draw on and across different kinds of ‘musickings’ (Small, 1998; see also Moisala et al., 2014) and different kinds of ‘listening assemblages’ (Duffy, 2017) to illustrate several key points about musical scale production. The chapters are also ordered, with a thread that connects them, as I want to explore first how music often works through a shared understanding of musical conventions, but that the establishment and extension of that shared understanding is itself a musical process of ‘scaling up’ or, in Tsing’s terms, producing ‘scalability’. In selecting scale as the subject rather than the frame of cultural analysis, I follow Olli Pyyhtinen’s call ‘to ditch the method of zooming in and zooming out that goes with the shift of perspective’ that the local-global or ‘micro to macro binary’ entails (2017, 303). And instead of structuring the article according to pre-determined and ‘precision-nested’ scales ranging from the (micro-)local through the regional to the global or universal (see Tsing, 2012), the following sections instead each focus on different scalar processes—different musical means of making and unmaking scales and their connections—that could potentially work at (or between) any scale(s). To begin, though, I explain in greater detail what scale means and what it does by reviewing key literature on scale production, before highlighting in particular those studies that shed light on the cultural production of scale.

1.2 Towards the Cultural Production of Scale: An Unfinished Project

As Tsing (2012, 145) puts it, scale is fundamentally concerned with ‘the relationship between the small and the large’. But McCarthy has noted the ‘threatening unmanageability of scale as a concept’, as well as the word’s ‘slipperiness’ (2006, 33, 25). It is ‘a complex and highly abstract noun that expresses a number of different kinds of proportional relations’ (McCarthy, 2006, 21). The word is sometimes used to refer simply to ‘size’ or, in its geographical use, ‘spatial extent’ (Marston, 2000, 220), but it also usually implies a graduated succession of steps or a structured series of levels. Crucially, scale ‘is not simply an external fact awaiting discovery but a way of framing conceptions of reality’ (Delaney & Leitner, 1997, 94–5). It is ‘the spatial dimensionality necessary for a particular kind of view, whether up close or from a distance, microscopic or planetary’ (Tsing, 2005, 58).

The ‘recognition that what constitutes the regional, urban or the local is not contained within a particular physical territory’ (Bulkeley, 2005, 884), and the broader acknowledgement that scale is actively produced and practised, still comes up against the common-sense use of scale as ‘just a neutral frame for viewing the world’ (Tsing, 2005, 58). Scales are often the elements kept stable in studies of other objects—not least, as we have seen, in studies of music. Smith (1992, 61) has criticised the ‘trivializ[ation of] geographical scale as merely a question of methodological preference for the researcher’, suggesting that this trivialisation partly explains why ‘the division of the world into localities, regions, nations, and so forth is essentially taken for granted’ (ibid.; see also Latour, 2007; Jones III et al., 2017). Sets of nested and/or hierarchical scales tend to be ‘assumed in advance’, functioning as an a priori ‘transcendent model’ that makes it ‘difficult to conceive the world otherwise’ (Pyyhtinen, 2017, 301). It is in some sense surprising that these scalar categories have become so naturalised when they are by definition artificial abstractions: metaphorical frames used as tools for specific purposes. Tsing suggests that ‘the ease with which our computers zoom across magnifications lulls us into the false belief that both knowledge and things exist by nature in precision-nested scales’ (2012, 161; see also Latour, 2007). Édouard Glissant, in his Treatise on the Whole-World, highlights the religious basis of a scalar system that ‘hold[s] together the generality of the Universal and the dignity of the human individual’ (Glissant, 2020 [1997], 59). There is also surely also an explanation based in the rational, secular, scientific view of the world as subject to a set of inflexible and universal laws, the existence of which implies that the world’s phenomena are more or less predictable and capable of being interpreted on a spectrum from the micro to the macro. I suggest that listening more carefully and critically to the scale of music can offer an additional explanation for how certain scalar concepts have been so successfully scaled up, in the process helping to challenge such ‘false beliefs’ and common-sense trivialisations of scale.

This denaturalisation project is important politically and intellectually. For example, the moment a researcher selects—perhaps out of necessity or at least convenience—from a prescribed menu of scales is a moment of drastic selectivity that will affect and frame the researcher’s methods and findings (Marston et al., 2005). The implications for academic research are broader still: scale is implicated in conceptualisations of the relationship between the general and the specific, the universal and the particular, which affect perceptions about whether something is important or insignificant in relation, proportion or comparison to something else (see Tanoukhi, 2008; Brydon, 2016). As McCarthy explains: ‘The kinds of relationships designated by scale go beyond the simple physical sense of size. They straddle the qualitative/quantitative divide, enabling conceptual movement between argument and evidence, generality and specificity, concreteness and abstraction’ (McCarthy, 2006, 25). Researchers such as the musicologist Anna Bull have been keen to go ‘beyond the microsocial’ and take account of ‘wider’ contexts and conditioning factors (Bull, 2019, 1), in part because this helps with the political purchase of their research. (Sub-)disciplines can also be divided and ranked according to scale (McCarthy, 2006): compare, for example, micro- and macroeconomics, or local and global history. Crucially, academics can use scale in a way that gives it ‘causal force’ (Marston et al., 2005, 6). The ‘global’, for example, is often presented as unavoidable, ‘neutralizing the agency of the local’ (ibid.). Even dichotomies between, say, ‘local resistance and global structures of capitalism’ are unhelpful because, as Tsing explains, such binaries ‘draw us into an imagery in which the global is homogeneous precisely because we oppose it to the heterogeneity we identify as locality. By letting the global appear homogeneous, we open the door to its predictability and evolutionary status as the latest stage in macronarratives’ (Tsing, 2005, 58).

Scale is political because it concerns power. When scales are given a different hierarchical order, or even when a new scalar category is successfully introduced, these ‘scale redefinitions alter and express changes in the geometry of power by strengthening power and control by some while disempowering others’ (Swyngedouw, 1997, 169). Newstead et al. (2003, 486) assert that this is ‘what scale in fact is: the temporary fixing of the territorial scope of particular modalities of power’. The fact that scalar fixes are produced and negotiated rather than natural and ontological does not mean that they do not exist, or that they merely describe the world (see Blakey, 2021). Scale’s framing function gives it the power to make a difference. For Marston: ‘the outcomes of these framings—the particular ways in which scale is constructed—are tangible and have material consequences’ (2000, 221). For Smith, too: ‘Scale is an active progenitor of specific social processes’ (Smith, 1992, 66). He conceives it as ‘the criterion of difference not between places so much as between different kinds of places’ (1992, 64) and thus a key process of spatial differentiation.

For those working with an awareness of scaling’s political power, then, it has been important ‘to understand the origins, determination and inner coherence and differentiation of each scale as already contained within the structure of capital’ (Jones III et al., 2017, 181). This has involved asking: ‘What is it—what processes, what sorts of activities—that not only produces and demarcates relatively stable scales, but binds them together in some sort of a “nested hierarchy”?’ (Mitchell, 2002, 71). And it has involved investigating what makes certain political scalar fixes work or what has made them appealing. Tsing has noted the tremendous effort involved in constructing and advocating for particular scalar systems, emphasising how the appeal of twenty-first-century globalism comes through its rhetorical and ideological association with progress, ‘futurism’, ‘newness’ and all-encompassing ‘circulation’ as opposed to ‘imagined stagnant locals’ (Tsing, 2000, 346). Much work in this field has been based on Smith’s initial (2010 [1984]) work on ‘uneven development’ and capitalism’s role in ordering space into a complex multi-scale system in which not all scales are equal. Smith argued that the conceptualisation and organisation of the landscape into regions, cities and nations of varying power was a capitalist scalar fix, and that the ‘flow’ and ‘spacelessness’ of capitalist globalism represented ‘not the extinction of place per se but the reinvention of place at a different scale’ (1996, 72; italics in original).

Smith’s early economistic formulations of scale theory have been criticised for their ‘rigidity and functionalism’ (Jones III et al., 2017, 142), but he and others inspired by his theorising steadily developed a richer and more sophisticated set of analytical tools for studying the political and social dynamics of scale-making. A key contribution of this work has been the understanding that scales are rarely discretely organised; rather, they ‘interpenetrate’ (Marston, 2000, 227), as ‘Links among scale-making projects can bring each project vitality and power’ (Tsing, 2005, 58). Certain concepts of the regional and the national work to produce the global, for example, and a particular form of urbanisation is intrinsic to what we understand as globalisation. And Smith himself turned to analysis of a cultural production—an art piece named the ‘Homeless Vehicle’—to demonstrate precisely this ‘active social and political connectedness of apparently different scales, [and] their deliberate confusion and abrogation’ (Smith, 1992, 66).

Smith’s series of studies on conceptual artworks still represent some of the most direct attempts to appreciate the role of culture in scale-making, although there is room for a considerably deeper analysis of this process. Smith focused on art pieces—such as Krzysztof Wodiczko’s ‘Poliscar’ and ‘Homeless Vehicle’—that functioned simultaneously as ‘an art object and a resolutely practical vehicle of urban reconquest’ (Smith, 1996, 63). He wrote that the ‘Homeless Vehicle’ was an ‘instrument of political empowerment’ because it worked ‘symbolically and practically’, with an emphasis on the practical (Smith, 1992, 60). It practically enabled ‘evicted people to “jump scales”—to organize the production and reproduction of daily life and to resist oppression and exploitation at a higher scale—over a wider geographical field’ (ibid.). He emphasised the ‘symbiosis of the functional and symbolic object’, suggesting that this art piece ‘works as critical art only to the extent that it is simultaneously functional’ (ibid., 54). He had little to say about the scalar potential of artistic pieces and practices lacking an explicitly practical or functional dimension, however.

This focus on the literal rather than the artistic, or the material over the representation, is characteristic of much work that builds upon Smith’s studies of art objects. Newstead et al. (2003), for example, have also sought to apply Marxist and Smith-informed conceptions of scale-making to ‘an arena of examination addressed by cultural geography—the production and contestation of cultural landscapes’ and ‘cultural identity’ (Newstead et al., 2003, 485). Their attention to ‘visions’ and ‘reimaginations’ of scale focuses primarily on the branding and propaganda of political organisations and institutions, although they do analyse one art piece: the retablo of Braulio Barrientos. This work is interpreted as a representation of ‘the counter-hegemonic’ construction of scale (ibid., 487), building on Don Mitchell’s point about ‘the subversive power of labor mobility’ for controlling scale (2002, 64; see also Herod, 2010). In Newstead et al.’s analysis, however, the scale-making significance of the artwork seems to come through what it depicts, namely Mexican migrants’ border-transgressing creation of a transnational space. It is the artist’s subjects more than the art form or artistic processes per se that are doing the scalar work in this account.

The opposite is true for Richard Howitt’s work on the relationship between music and geographical scale. Howitt has taken the ‘serendipitous homonym for both geographical and musical scales [as] a starting point’ (Howitt, 1998, 50). (One of scale’s many meanings derives from the Middle English word for ladder, and it was in this sense of ‘climbing’ that the word came to be applied in terms of musical scale [McCarthy, 2006, 22].) Howitt treats musical scales merely as ‘a useful metaphor for understanding the ways in which geographical scale involves relations between elements of complex and dynamic geographical totalities’ (Howitt, 1998, 49). Foregoing ‘detailed musicological discussion’ in favour of exploring musical scales as ‘a metaphor of geographical scale’ (ibid., 57), Howitt offers a different conceptualisation of scale—focusing on relations instead of just size or level—rather than an explanation of how scale is produced or contested, whether musically or otherwise. On the contrary, Howitt’s conclusion calls for geographical scale to be treated as a relatively stable causal factor. But there is potential to develop work on music and scale beyond the ‘serenditipitous homonym’ and the merely metaphorical.

With the various musical examples that follow, I seek to go beyond Smith’s and Howitt’s work to emphasise not only how practice and metaphor are interconnected when it comes to scalar musickings, but also that music has a scale-making or scale-contesting power as art and as a cultural practice. I am following the work of Diana Brydon (2016) who, through focusing on decolonial literature, has highlighted how artistic experimentation ‘negotiates scale’, not least through ‘troubl[ing] the prevailing paradigms and scales’ and enabling the imagination of alternative scalar forms and relations (Brydon, 2016, 31; 28). I argue, in particular, that focusing on music allows the cultural production of scale to be more fully understood. To do so, I proceed through four examples of musical scale-making. With the examples I choose I make clear that I do not approach music as a set of completed ‘works’. I am making sense of music in the context in which it is heard, focusing on listeners’ diverse responses to and uses of the music. I am interested in all the cultural practices of music’s ‘being and doing’ (Wood et al., 2007, 868), following Dorr’s (2018) capacious approach to music that takes in performance, listening and other aspects of ‘musicking’ (Small, 1998). The book does, however, include some more-or-less ‘formal’ musical analysis because specific compositional features, performance techniques and arrangements are part of the range of methods through which musicians might effect the cultural production of scale.

First, I analyse the experimental scalar agility and dexterity of Janelle Monáe, an American musician whose output spans the genres of R&B, psychedelic soul, hip-hop and funk. Focusing on her series of ‘Metropolis’ concept records, I explore Monáe’s musical creation of a multi-scalar world, highlighting the range of simple and complex musical techniques through which she produces scalar multiplicity and interrelations. I argue that the scalar qualities of this world—and her ability to explore different relationships between different scales of social life, from the body to the metropolitan to the universal—make her music politically transgressive.

Second, I analyse the ‘grime’ genre’s conjuring and use of the postcode scale—a form of what is often referred to as ‘intense’ or ‘hyper’ localism—as an example of the political deployment of scale as ‘level of resolution’. Building on the work of Dan Hancox (2013, 2018), Monique Charles (2016, 2019), Joy White (2019, 2020) and others, and showing how grime differs from other rap-based genres and scenes that also use local lyrical references, the chapter uses examples from the music of Wiley, Roll Deep, Dizzee Rascal and Nadia Rose to explore how the genre’s distinctive repetition, rhythmic intensification, staccato rapping style and selective musical audience-building contribute to a modernist, fine-grained postcode scale that has been used in political protests contesting the meaning of the ‘local’.

Third, Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a Wonderful World’ is highlighted to exemplify popular music’s tendency and ability to build from the particular into the general—or to connect the personal to the universal. I explore how the musical transition to what Glissant calls ‘Whole-World thinking’ functions in various cover versions of the song, including politically charged live performances at a Swedish climate protest in 2019, and outside Lviv train station (and widely shared on social media) during Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. I focus on how the song’s crucial ‘tritone substitution’ chord—which is what musically accompanies the lyrics’ logical leap from local observation to universal claim—is performed differently in different contexts, and I highlight how its inter-scalar element is crucial to its functioning both as a ubiquitous popular song and, in specific contexts, as a protest song.

Drawing on Grant Olwage’s (2004) accounts of ‘musical colonialism’, and especially Kofi Agawu’s (2016) work on ‘tonality as a colonizing force’, the fourth chapter explores music’s colonial processes as a musical ‘scale-making project’ and an effort to produce a certain sonic ‘scalability’ (following Tsing, 2005, 2012). I draw attention to the role of music in the expansion of European mission stations and colonial settlements in southern Africa in the early decades of the nineteenth century, before the periods that Agawu and Olwage focus on. I do so by focusing on the scale-building project of missionary music scholars in London, and I show how this process was connected to contemporary debates about slavery, empire, race and humanity.

With these four examples—focusing on an artist, a genre, a (section of a) song, and an international musical-colonial policy—the book demonstrates the richness of music’s scalar relations, highlighting how diverse practices of musicking in varied genres, in different historical and political contexts, and among different musical communities, can contribute to the cultural production of scale. The final concluding chapter highlights how, while music can be understood in relation to ‘large-scale’ geopolitical processes such as colonialism, it also provides a means of contesting dominant scalar systems and hierarchies, and of imagining and inaugurating a world scaled otherwise.