Keywords

In March 2020 I attended a climate protest in Lysekil, Sweden. Demonstrators from across Sweden came to this town of some 8000 inhabitants on the west coast, at the tip of a peninsula north of Gothenburg, to protest against the expansion of an oil refinery there. It was wet and bitterly cold, and the politics of the event were not straightforward. The protestors—most of whom had come on coaches from Gothenburg organised by the environmental activist networks Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace and Fridays For Future—did not seem popular with many of the locals in Lysekil. Banners, car horns and other hostile statements from passers-by made it clear that oil refinery expansion—which would bring more jobs to this community—was well-supported by at least some of the people and trades union organisers in the town. The Swedish oil company Preem has been a major employer there since it took over the refinery in 2003. Behind the 150 or so assembled protestors on Lysekil’s Rosvikstorg was a clearly visible message posted on a hoarding by an association of local businesses: ‘We cannot solve all climate problems with imports—Let Preem continue to develop our fuel’ (‘Vi kan inte lösa alla klimatproblem med import – Låt Preem fortsätta utveckla våra drivmedel’). The centre-right Moderate Party had organised a counter-demonstration in a nearby park. The atmosphere was tense. As with many big demonstrations, the event involved a series of political speeches interspersed with live music performances. One speaker proclaimed: ‘Six hundred jobs are nothing compared to life on Earth’ (‘Sexhundra arbetstillfällen är ingenting mot livet på jorden’). The compere encouraged the crowd to ‘dansa oss varm’ (‘dance ourselves warm’) as punk-rock bands and dub-reggae artists played short sets, often with explicitly political lyrics.

In this context I want to discuss the performance at this protest by the Gothenburg-based singer-songwriter Jens Lekman. Lekman is another artist who demonstrates musical ‘scalecraft’. An interest in different scales of cultural experience is evident in his approach to live shows and touring, as he produces and explores different levels of fan-performer intimacy. During the pandemic he embraced the ‘compressed intimacy’ of one-to-one performances with individual fans over Zoom on his ‘Zoom jukebox’ sessions, for example (see Dodds, 2021). For a Guest Studio Session streamed from the Nordic Watercolour Museum in Västra Götaland in April 2021 he requested submissions of fans’ stories which he turned into songs and performed directly back to them over Zoom. The premise of his 2015 Living Room Tour was also that his songs that circulate globally and that are toured in large venues internationally could be transposed into a suburban living room with an intimate audience of a couple of dozen fans. Some of his song lyrics play with scalar themes: ‘The End of the World is Bigger Than Love’ (2012), for example, is an attempt to put personal heartbreak into perspective, while ‘How We Met, The Long Version’ (2017) plays with the kind of romantic story one might have to tell if one decided to take the Big Bang as the starting point. I have written elsewhere about his complex musical renderings of specific suburban spaces (Dodds, 2019), and he has written explicitly political songs about his home city of Gothenburg (see, e.g., 2011's ‘Waiting For Kirsten’). However, in Lysekil Lekman announced to the crowd that he mostly writes love songs and that ‘I have no protest songs’ (‘jag har inga protest songs’). He explained that he would instead select from a popular musical repertoire or canon a ‘classic’ appropriate for this occasion. The last song of his set was a version of Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a Wonderful World’.

This was an interesting song choice for a climate protest. It functioned as a political protest song—one that apparently motivated and united the assembled demonstrators—by virtue of its ability to connect the particular or local to the general or global. ‘What a Wonderful World’ exemplifies Western pop music’s propensity to reach general truths from specific experiences, or to connect the local or experiential to some version of the universal. Much art does this, as Glissant (2020) points out. Cultural practices deploy a poetics or aesthetics of relation that ‘leads us to conceive of the elusive “worldness”’ of particular and emplaced experience (ibid., 12). This ‘aesthetic of Relation’ is, for Glissant, ‘the search, wandering and often anxious, of conjunctions of forms and structures that allow an idea of the world’ (ibid., 11; 19). Glissant’s ‘Whole-World thinking’ comes through ‘the intertwined poetics that allow me to sense how my place joins up with others, how without moving it ventures elsewhere, and how it carries me along in this immobile movement’ (ibid., 74). It entails what he calls ‘the trace, as opposed to systematic thought, [which] acts as a wandering that guides us. We know that the trace is what puts us, all of us, wherever we come from, in Relation’ (ibid., 9). Further, ‘Trace thought confirms the concept as movement, and relates it: gives its narrative, places it in relation, sings its relativity’ (ibid., 50). Music makes this connection, putting personal experience and the world in relation, through its aesthetic qualities, and I suggest that ‘What a Wonderful World’ is a useful example for exploring how music can support the semantic meaning of lyrics that express precisely this connection.

The lyrical premise of ‘What a Wonderful World’ is relatively simple, and it stands in a tradition of pop songs that do broadly similar things lyrically and structurally. The singer makes simple, particular observations of things that we might understand as beautiful—green trees, blooming red roses, ‘friends shaking hands’ and so on—and seems to find in these evidence that the world is wonderful. The semantic relevance of this song to the politics of the climate protest are also relatively clear. The assembled audience are reminded of the beauty of the world as a whole, the maintenance of which is their explicit purpose for attending this event in an icy town square where the spring colours had still not arrived. In a basic sense, the audience are reminded of the bigger picture of their efforts and impelled by the singer to focus less on the local politics of the day than the ultimate environmental imperative, which is global in scale. It was, in Lysekil, a musical-poetic version of the message that 600 jobs here are less important than life on earth, and also that what happens here is fundamentally connected to the wider world. It may also be relevant that this Louis Armstrong song falls into a broad category of popular songs that appear almost placeless and timeless—endlessly reproduced and reinterpreted, and known, perhaps even word by word, by almost everybody familiar with Western popular music, such that the assembled protestors could grasp that meaning in the song’s performance without having to listen closely to the lyrics.

This could be interpreted, following Smith (1996), as an example of musical ‘scale jumping’. Smith describes how ‘scale-jumping as a political strategy’ entails intervening in the political geographies of a given context by ‘remaking the geographical scale of daily social and political intercourse’ (Smith, 1996, 73; 65—italics in original). Mitchell (2002, 71) has similarly explored ‘how social movements are able to “jump scale”’ when they ‘transform their actions from ones that impinge on processes at one scale to ones that are effective at other scales’. A device or technique that enables scale-jumping is one that allows the reconfiguration, rearticulation and recasting of political struggles at a different scale, and the rescaling of political power. As mentioned in the introduction, Smith’s examples of artworks with this function were chosen because of their demonstrable practicality—they ‘literally’ gave people power over a new scale of social life (Smith, 1996, 66). Lekman’s choice of protest song did not do that. It was, nevertheless, involved in the complex reconfiguration of that political protest that day. This is not simply because it gestured poetically towards the importance of a global perspective or because it could be practically used for this purpose. Rather, the ability of the song to recast the day’s attention to a larger scale, and to assert the imbrication of the local with the wider world, came through its use of specific musical conventions and aesthetic features that accompanied the jump in scale, ensuring a smooth landing.

‘What A Wonderful World’ is based on a chord progression that for the most part conforms to the basic rules of modal or diatonic theory. (It is necessary to briefly summarise some basic premises of modal music here—sometimes treated almost as universal rules of composition—although I intend to denaturalise these premises and rules in the next chapter.) Simply put, Louis Armstrong’s version of ‘What a Wonderful World’ is based on the F major scale, which includes the pitches F, G, A, B♭, C, D, and E. This means F major functions as the ‘tonic’ chord. (Note that in music theory the term ‘global tonic’ is sometimes used to describe the key that defines a piece of music as a whole, as opposed to a ‘local tonic’ which is involved when the piece modulates temporarily to a different key.) According to the conventions of diatonic tonality, listeners experience varying degrees of tension when the chords—always staying within the key—move away from the tonic. They then hear a kind of satisfying resolution when the piece of music returns to that tonic chord. In ‘What a Wonderful World’, all the opening chords are within the F major key, and the vocal melody initially uses only these notes. The F major chord accompanies the first line (‘I see trees …’) and the simple observations about the blooming red roses have a broadly conventional accompaniment within the key, following a chord progression that moves through varying kinds of distance from the tonic, but always with the expectation that it will ultimately return to F major and offer some kind of closure.

However, something different happens towards the end of the verse, exactly when the lyrics jump from these specific observations (‘I see them bloom’) to general claim (‘what a wonderful world’). The line ‘and I think to myself’ is accompanied by a transition to a chord that is not in the F major key. This is the D flat major seven chord, which includes several pitches not in the F major scale (although it does include the pitches of F and C). The chord therefore sounds strange, not fundamentally wrong but ambiguous, unsettling, a step outside expectations. This type of chord is often known as a tritone substitution.Footnote 1 Tritone substitution chords are widely used by jazz musicians to create a sense of uncertainty, intrigue or ambiguity. They may also feature in other popular music genres for a similar purpose. Some of the suggestive, funky, mildly jarring chords that Stevie Wonder uses, for example, are also tritone substitutions. So, as Armstrong sings ‘think to myself …’, the accompanying chord sounds strange, unsettled or uncertain to listeners who are in some sense familiar with the conventions of Western music, or who have a sense of the key the song is in. It creates a strong feeling of distance from the tonic chord, along with a kind of ambiguity or doubt. Unlike other chords within the key, it does not come with the assurance of resolution. It could be inaugurating a key change, in fact. (In ‘What a Wonderful World’, it could signify a shift to the parallel key of F minor, for example.) The fact of it being a temporary substitution from the chords in the key is only confirmed when the piece returns to chords in the original key.

This tritone substitution chord is emphasised in Armstrong’s ‘What a Wonderful World’ in three main ways. First, as the chord changes, the pitch of the vocal melody does not. That is, the singer reaches the pitch of F at the word ‘you’ in ‘for me and you’ then stays on it through the following ‘and I think to myself what a’, so the chord change (at ‘think’) is the only thing that changes harmonically. This makes the chord transition more noticeable. (The vocal melody staying on the same note for so long also contributes to the sense of the song balancing uncertainly, unsure of which way to go.) Second, at the transition to the tritone substitution chord, several instruments temporarily drop out. The verse is accompanied by arpeggios on the guitar and by smooth strings, but the strings disappear as Armstrong sings ‘and I think to myself’. This dropping of a key part of the instrumental accompaniment creates a temporarily stark or spare musical texture that emphasises the remaining elements (namely, the guitar’s move to the tritone substitution chord). And third, the chord is emphasised by the fact that it lasts twice as long as the preceding chords in the verse. A stable, consistent momentum builds in the introduction and the verse with a chord change every two beats (i.e. two chords per bar). Then, the sustained tritone substitution chord is the first time the chord lasts a full bar. This longer chord gives a sense of suspended momentum, reinforcing the feeling of uncertainty. Lekman emphasised this even further in his performance by prolonging the chord, letting it ring out beyond the end of the bar and into silence, temporarily losing strict time before finally resuming with the key line: ‘what a wonderful world’.

And this is surely the key line: the scale-jumping or transition to ‘Whole-World thinking’ (Glissant, 2020) is only complete with the word ‘world’. The line could have been ‘what a wonderful park’, ‘what a wonderful day’, ‘what a wonderful sight’, ‘what a wonderful town’, ‘what a wonderful garden’ or ‘what a wonderful place’. Each of these would have been a more reasonable statement to make after the series of specific observations of trees and flowers, but instead it is specifically a wonderful world.

So, if the sense of taking a leap is supported by the ambiguity and uncertainty of the suspended tritone substitution chord, how does the music land the jump? How does it finally achieve this transition?

It does so partly through a reassuring and familiar cadence (i.e. the resolution of the musical phrase) in the chords. The chords move from C7 to F (the ‘dominant’ chord to the ‘root’ chord of the key) in a ‘perfect’ or ‘authentic’ cadence that lands back at the tonic. This is an extremely common cadence in Western popular music, especially at the ending of a section or song, and it is associated with a strong sense of satisfying resolution or closure. The transition from C7 to F is especially satisfying because of smooth ‘voice leading’ whereby the seventh of C7 (which is Bb) moves down a semitone to the third of F (which is A). The effect of this closure in ‘What a Wonderful World’ is doubly strong after the radical uncertainty of the tritone chord. To reach the home or tonic chord via the most familiar-sounding cadence resolves all the tension in the most smooth and resounding way possible. Crucially, this return to the tonic in the chords happens just as Armstrong sings the word ‘world’. The sense of having leaped uncertainly that was generated with the extended tritone substitution chord is resolved, such that musically the song makes landing on the word ‘world’ seem pretty much as natural and satisfying as is possible within the conventions of modern Western music.

There is one more point to add to this, though. Armstrong could have increased or reinforced the sense of closure and resolution even more by also singing ‘world’ on the pitch of F, but—the first time, at least—he does not. The first time he sings ‘what a wonderful world’, the melody moves from F (‘what a’), down to E (‘won’), then smoothly upwards: F (‘der’), G (‘ful’), A (‘world’). It would have been perfectly natural, indeed conventional, to end back down at F in the vocal melody, but the move to A gives some sense of upward motion, of having arrived somewhere other than where he started. The end on A sounds pleasing in part because of the aforementioned ‘voice leading’ in the chords (i.e. the move from C7 to F entailing the half-tone move down from Bb to A), but it still gives a greater sense of uplift, and of having reached somewhere new, than the more conventionally reassuring return to F. (In fact, the last time Armstrong sings ‘what a wonderful world’, the ‘world’ does land on F, giving some finality to the song.)

If these details sound overly technical, just listen to the song from the beginning, and pay attention to how the chord sounds at ‘think to myself’ (0:21–0:24), and the effect of the higher-pitched note at ‘world’ (0:27–0:28), and hopefully the basic point will be discernible: there is a moment of ambiguity at ‘think to myself’, and sense of closure as well as upward movement at ‘world’. I suggest that all this can be understood as musical scale-jumping, or the artistic and aesthetic relation of the local particulars in the verse to the general claim of the world being wonderful.

These specific features of ‘What a Wonderful World’—the tritone substitution chord, the perfect cadence and so on—are just some of the many composition techniques and performance and production details musicians use to create some sense of transition or breakthrough from one mood or state to another, often at the transition between different structural elements of a piece (e.g. between verse and chorus, and back again). A famous one is the key change, which featured in around a quarter of pop hits in the second half of the twentieth century, often to build additional energy at the closing chorus. Listen, for example, to 03:23 in Bon Jovi’s ‘Living on a Prayer’ (1986) to hear this musical method of breaking through to a higher level. In the rock tradition, drummers commonly vary the dynamics of their performance to introduce new sections, through loosening the hi-hat or providing drum fills as a chorus approaches. Rock guitarists change their playing style or employ an effects pedal at transitional moments in songs, too. In the twenty-first century, many contemporary EDM-inspired pop songs favour timbre-based production techniques such as ‘drops’ and filter sweeps for similar transition purposes. These can often build tension, create a moment of crisis and thereby increase the intensity or emphasis on the release or resolution of that tension. All these kinds of techniques could be used to accompany a similar lyrical leap from the specific to the general; many of them feature, in fact, at the moment when both Tears for Fears (1982) and Gary Jules (2001) declare, on the basis of their personal experience, that ‘it’s a very very mad world’. In both versions of ‘Mad World’, there are several striking tonal, dynamics and production changes as the chorus reaches its key claim. Indeed, many songs achieve this kind of jump in scale, and the techniques described for Armstrong’s ‘What a Wonderful World’ are far from the only musical methods of scale-jumping available.

Furthermore, the techniques in Armstrong’s version are not always used to the same scale-jumping effect, nor are they applied consistently by everyone who performs it. Jens Lekman, for example, adapted the song in ways that specifically highlighted the scale-jumping effect and its political implications in the Lysekil context of counterposing ‘six hundred jobs’ with ‘life on Earth’. His version was transposed into the key of E major, and Lekman sang the melody almost an octave higher than in Armstrong’s original. His higher-pitched voice, with its characteristic naivety, sensitivity and vulnerability, made the song sound sadder, as if lamenting what could be lost (rather than, as in Armstrong’s version, celebrating the beauty of the world). Lekman’s live version also replaced the original’s lush, rich, full instrumentation with a simple acoustic guitar accompaniment, producing a sparer, more stripped-down texture that emphasised the vulnerability of his voice. Whereas the guitar in Armstrong’s version plays arpeggios (i.e. individually picked strings playing each note of the chord in sequence), Lekman kept the same metre but with full strummed chords (i.e. all the strings played simultaneously). This had the effect of making the moment of transition to the tritone substitution chord more immediately noticeable. And in this section of the original version, Armstrong sings ‘wonderful world’ as a full, smooth phrase with no pause, but Lekman left a noticeable gap separating ‘wonderful’ from ‘world’, prolonging the sense of uncertainty and delaying the closure of the final line, perhaps with the intention of stressing that scalar jump. This separation was even clearer the final time, as Lekman also let the guitar ring silent during a long pause, before finally reaching ‘world’ on the tonic. All these adaptations brought the radical and, in this context, politically vital leap to ‘Whole-World thinking’ to the fore.

With the exception of this adaptation, Lekman stayed closely to the precise rhythm of the vocal melody, even more so than Armstrong, who came from a jazz tradition. But other versions of the song have been much more relaxed and playful in this respect. Another famous version was recorded by Tony Bennett and k.d. lang in 2002 for an album of classics entitled ‘A Wonderful World’. In their version of ‘What a Wonderful World’, they demonstrate what Allan Moore (2012, 103) would describe as an ‘extremely laid back’ ‘heard attitude to rhythm’, with an almost conversational style in the duet. This means that they intentionally do not sing in time with the beat; sometimes they leave long pauses after the chord change before essentially catching up, at their own speed. This unhurried attitude with a varying rhythm in the vocal melody is just one of a series of features in this version that emphasises the mysterious, woozy, dream-like and even magical elements of the song. In k.d. lang’s first verse, there is minimal percussion and the beat is not prominent, which makes it sound less rigidly structured. Then, at the transition to the tritone substitution chord, we hear the prominent ring of a single note probably on a vibraphone or other metallophone instrument. This is the kind of sound, often provided by a tinkling triangle or resonant bell, that might accompany a moment of ‘magic’ in a classic Hollywood movie. In this version of ‘What a Wonderful World’, in the context of the more woozy rhythm and atmosphere, it makes that moment of scale-jumping sound distinctly ‘magical’.

Another famous recording of the song is by Joey Ramone’s, also from 2002. This is radically different in a rhythmic sense from Armstrong’s, Bennet and lang’s and Lekman’s versions, with its various musical features from the rock tradition emphasising not a ‘magic’ leap per se but, rather, a moment of radical breakthrough to a new level. It replaces the arpeggios on the acoustic guitar with bar chords on an electric guitar playing eight strums per beat, which makes the song sound extremely different metrically and dynamically. Ramone sings with a much stricter ‘attitude to rhythm’ (Moore, 2012, 103); his more staccato vocals are perfectly in time with the beat. It is also faster, with its steadier, simple rhythm creating greater urgency and a more unstoppable, train-like momentum. The scale-jump is emphasised by different kinds of dynamic features: most notably, the guitar is palm-muted in the verse accompaniment in time with the beat but then, at the transition to the tritone substitution chord (‘… think to myself …’), Ramone lets the full, sustained chord ring out. He also adds a lead guitar lick here. This dramatic dynamic change is also heard in the drums, which become more intense at that point, switching from a closed-high-hat sound in the verse to cymbals that are more resonant. These are all techniques commonly heard at moments of transition in rock and grunge songs, and they are perfectly suited in this context to give that sense of breaking through to a new level. Ramone reinforces this euphoric sense of reaching a higher level at the end of the song, too. Whereas Armstrong, Lekman and Bennett and lang all end their versions with a strong sense of closure by singing ‘world’ on the tonic note, Ramone actually reaches a higher pitch with a different closing melody at this point in his recording. His version resembles Lekman’s in the long pause, fading to silence, it leaves for the final ‘what a wonderful …’. Here the drums finally drop out and the song’s rhythm is paused for the first time, as if finally suspended mid-jump. But then energy is reinjected for ‘world’, which moves through a different melody that gives a stronger sense of final uplift than in any of these other versions.

These examples demonstrate the musical scale-jump can be achieved in fundamentally different ways, even in versions of the same composition. In fact, the original can be transformed almost beyond recognition but still put to the same scale-jumping purposes. Watch, for example, the promotional video for ‘The Line’, an apparently revolutionary proposal for an urban living concept in Saudi Arabia, described as a ‘linear smart city’.Footnote 2 The video begins with a depiction of a woman in a grey, banal, everyday urban scene. She then jumps through a kind of portal that transports her into a radically futuristic, bright and colourful vision of life in ‘The Line’. The soundtrack to this is a shortened and transformed version of ‘What a Wonderful World’ with an entirely different chord structure. The ‘red roses too … think to myself’ lines accompany the opening scenes of urban dullness. Then, a combination of dynamic changes accompany the singer’s ‘what a wonderful …’ as the depicted woman jumps through the portal. At ‘world’, the musical style has transformed dramatically, as the woman explores this new and revolutionary world of urban living. There is no tritone substitution chord here, nor do we hear the melody or cadences of the original and its famous cover versions. These features are replaced with filters and other production techniques from the EDM tradition that achieve by other means a similarly radical sense of finding a new level or of breaking through to the other side of a boundary, just as we hear the words ‘what a wonderful world’ for the first time. It may be significant, nonetheless, that those promoting ‘The Line’ chose ‘What a Wonderful World’ for the marketing campaign. Even in its radically altered form, its associations with breaking through, with moving beyond the banal and reaching a higher plane of reality, still function.

Other performances of the song have even minimised or entirely abrogated its scale-jumping function, for different reasons and in different ways. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson performed a version for Michael Caine and Josh Hutcherson’s characters in the 2012 movie ‘Journey 2: The Mysterious Island’. Johnson also sang in a version recorded for the opening credits. This has different verse lyrics and a much faster dance rhythm, with no dynamic change at all at the tritone substitution chord. The only sense of ‘breakthrough’ occurs in an additional instrumental section at the end, which features an upward key change. It seems to have been conceived as a generally uplifting song about the world’s wonderfulness, with no need to express the same jump from the particular to the general. The original Armstrong version features in a similarly flat sense but with a different purpose in the opening scenes of another movie: ‘Good Morning, Vietnam’ (1987). In that case, the song soundtracks montaged shots of violence and poverty in the Vietnam War, after being introduced on the radio by the disc jockey Adrian Cronauer (played by Robin Williams). In this context it features in a darkly ironic register, with the positive claim of it being ‘a wonderful world’ clashing uncomfortably with the scenes depicted. This ironic message also came through in a solo pianist’s performance of ‘What a Wonderful World’ outside a railway station in Lviv, Ukraine, in March 2022. A video of this performance was widely shared on social media, and it shows the pianist playing an instrumental version that, in the context of the fear and displacement caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, registers as bleakly, darkly ironic.Footnote 3 This version is transposed into the key of A major and played at a faster pace than Armstrong’s and especially Bennett and lang’s versions, with none of the uplifting or magical atmosphere. The pianist plays the chords as light arpeggios in the verse section, but at the transition to the tritone substitution, she switches to a full chord with a prominent bass, such that any lightness is quickly dispelled. Besides this, there is no dynamic change at this point, as this performance seems not to be concerned with jumping scale but, rather, with a general expression of dark, tragic irony. The bass-heavy chord on a slightly out-of-tune piano does, however, make the ‘think to myself’ section sound particularly dissonant, discordant and dark.

So, even if ‘What a Wonderful World’ functions as a scale-jumping song, especially in the context in which Jens Lekman performed it, emphasising and extending many of the original recording’s key musical scale-jumping features, the song does not always achieve this jump in scale. This point testifies to more than merely the remarkably flexible, context-dependent and endlessly reinterpretable nature of the popular song. It indicates something about the nature of musical scale-jumping and of the cultural production of scale more generally.

The artistic connection of local, discrete, personal experience and general truth is long-established, such that this leap does not need to be made every time. Even within ‘What a Wonderful World’, it is surely the first verse, or the first tritone-substitution-and-perfect-cadence, that really makes the jump; the rest of the song normalises and naturalises it through repetition and variation on the same theme. It is also fair to say that the overall effect of the song is not to draw attention to the jump per se, as if it is showing the cleverness of its own ability to make that jump. Instead of making the jump seem remarkable, the song’s functioning relies on a cultural convention in which the connectedness or inseparability of the personal and the general, the local and the world, the particular and the universal, is already established and naturalised, in the history of music and in arts and culture more generally. ‘What a Wonderful World’ has been part of establishing this, but it is just one of endless examples that have had this kind of accretional, long-term effect on people’s expectations of how culture produces and navigates scale. Cultural practices have long moved smoothly between these local and general poles, with the effect of establishing a naturalised relation between them, or even of fusing or entirely eliding the distinction.

For Glissant, this is the essential vocation of the artist or poet: to ‘establish Relation’, or to trace, beat and re-trace ‘the path that leads from our place to the world and back again’ (Glissant, 2020, 73; 118). It is through culture that we ‘discover that the place we live in, that we speak from, can no longer be separated from this mass of energy that calls us in the distance. We can no longer grasp its movement, its infinite variations, its sufferings and its pleasures, unless we relate it to that which moves so totally for us, in the totality of the world’ (ibid., 73). Simply put: ‘To write is to say: the world’ (ibid.). We are all, always, all of us, working with the ‘intertwined poetics that allow me to sense how my place joins up with others’ (ibid., 74). None of us can help but hear the ‘unstoppable murmuring’ of the world and we all ‘mix [it] into the mechanical, humdrum little tunes of our progress and our driftings’ (ibid., 8). The Whole-World, the rhizomatic totality, ‘demands our attention more every day and we are obliged to test our abilities against it. The writer and the artists have asked us to do this. Their work is marked by this vocation’ (ibid., 106). Further:

Everyone is embarking, at every moment, on a Treatise on the Whole-World. There are a hundred thousand billions of them, rising up everywhere. Each time different in sea spray and soil. In Guadeloupe or Valparaiso, you leave from Baffin Island, or the land of Sumatra or the bungalow Mon repos, first turning after the Post Office, or, if your silt has crumbled around you, from a line that you have sketched out in the spaces, and you rise to that knowledge. (Ibid., 109)

Crucially, this is not, for Glissant, a generalising or universalising practice. Quite the opposite. The kind of ‘Whole-World thinking’ we find in different cultural forms is concerned with ‘the rhizome of all places that makes up the totality’ and with ‘the infinite detail of the real’ (ibid., 109; 118). It is a concern with the world’s ‘extraordinary hybridity… the actual substance of each of their places, their minute or infinite detail and the thrilling sum of their particularities, that is to be placed in complicity with those of all places’ (ibid., 73). Glissant attends to those cultural practices that trace what Celia Britton (in ibid., 2) calls ‘an important and non-conflictual relation between the specificity of the place that one lives in and the world in general’. It is ‘trace thought’, as opposed to ‘systematic thought’, that puts our place in relation and ‘sings its relativity’ (ibid., 50). This trace ‘puts us, all of us, wherever we come from, in Relation’ (ibid., 9). His ‘Poetics of Relation’ is what ‘leads us to conceive of the elusive “worldness”’ of the ‘piling up of flashes of light, of communications’, ‘at the same time as it allows us to pick up some detail from it, and in particular to sing the praises of our place, unfathomable and irreversible’ (ibid., 12; 101). So, while Smith (1996) focuses on the practical ‘scale-jumping’ function of cultural artefacts, Glissant’s ‘Whole-World thinking’ leads us instead to emphasise the scalar work of art as art and, to some extent, to judge art by its scale-jumping function.

As this chapter has shown, ‘What a Wonderful World’ is a piece of music that can have a kind of scale-jumping function in specific contexts. At the climate protest, it changed the scalar politics of the day, musically recasting the scale of the political struggle from ‘six hundred jobs’ in Lysekil to ‘life on Earth’. But it did not do so through some narrowly practical application; its effectiveness came through its cultural performance and through its qualities as music—or at least through its manipulation of a pre-existing set of cultural expectations about musical resolution to a tonic, and through its subtle compositional features that accompany a natural and satisfying transition from the particular to the general. It is a song that traces and makes interrelations through a kind of poetic ‘wandering’, and through playing with ‘conjunctions of forms and structures that allow an idea of the world’ (Glissant, 2020, 19), as well as the ‘fractures and ruptures’ that fuse and lead to new relations and ‘completely new outcomes’ (ibid., 13–14). Simply put, it does not so much jump scales as trace the path or fuse a new relation between the particular and the general, between this place and a common, shared Whole-World, or the local-experiential and the general. It produces, in some sense, a flattened scalar system in which the local and the global, say, cannot be abstracted from or used to explain the other; instead, they are part of the same continuum or category. Music is one of those artistic and poetic forms that somehow ‘preserves’ or brings to rest the infinite ‘piling up of flashes of light, of communications’ that we otherwise naively and disjointedly experience as the Whole-World (ibid., 100; 101). Music is, by extension, one of those cultural forms that enable certain kinds of truth claims about the world—truth claims taken to be useful, valid, shareable, compelling; that it is wonderful, for example—that are not based on stably replicable scientific procedures or evidence. It has features and functions that make such claims work in persuasive ways and with political and practical effects. Through music, moreover, scalar jumps become normalised and stabilised as new relations, such that they no longer register notably as ‘jumps’. Instead, they fuse connections that become common-sense. As Glissant (2020, 108) puts it, ‘we are no longer able to sing, speak or work based on our place alone, without plunging into the imagination of this totality’. We already live in a world whose scales are made by music.