POPULAR MUSIC AND GLOBALIZATION
influence of T. W. Adorno, particularly evident
BY YARA EL-GHADBAN
Popular Music serves as the getaway to explore
the representation and meanings associated
with music in the time of globalization.
Social Sciences and humanities on the
relationship between music, place, identity and
society and how they interwined in the context
of globalization.
Globalization at once as a stage upon which
processes of contract and friction take place
and as a process of propelled and mediatated
capital.
GLOBALIZATION AND MUSIC
They tend up to conjure up critical
reflection regarding the notion of culture, place
and identity.
ANTROPOLOGICAL- study of human races,
origins, societies and culture.
ETHNOMUSICOLOGY- study of music in
sociocultural control.
‘PLAYING OUT’ – a sense of common
nationhood or belongings in a context marked
by uneven transnational social, cultural, political
and economic transactions.
Adorno (1991) – seminal work on the intimate
relationship between musical structure and
social structure.
This chapter seeks to counterbalance the
in the “New” musicology of the 1990s, by
proposing an agenda for the sociology of music
that is focused firmly on people making music. It
outlines a “toolkit” of different empirical
approaches for the analysis of music as a social
process, focusing on in its role in people's
everyday lives and in identity construction.
There is discussion of work that has examined
the impact of social factors on composition,
including that of commercial competition on
innovation in pop music; social factors in the
construction of musicians' reputations; the
relationship between sub-cultural identity and
musical taste; and music's role in the social
construction of subjectivity. These studies use
empirical methods ranging from participant
observation, through interviews and the
analysis of historical documents, to the more
impersonal methods of large-scale social
statistics and economic surveys.
Tia DeNora -- signaled a shift in focus from
aesthetic object and their content to the
cultural practices in and through which
aesthetic material were appropriated and used
to produce social life.
Emphasize the links between popular music and
social change. The youth conceived as
liminoidal representing a moment of ambiguity
transition even crisis—have been central to
investigating the class, racial, generational
tensions that permeate and inevitably lead
change in the society.
These groundbreaking studies lead the way for
the sociocultural analysis of other music such
as; reggae, rock ‘n roll, heavy metal and rap and
hip hop, all of which became globalized.
Other sociologists;
Focuses on the concrete, step-by-step, word of
making art and music happens.
Art Worlds (Howard Becker 1982)
How any form of cultural productions,
including music even that which is individual in
appearance results from interactions of large
network of actors.
Producing Pop (Keith Negus 1992)
Unravels mechanism and strategies of
mutinational records companies employs to
produce popular music and to produce popular
music and develop an promote successful
musicians.
Various branches of industry:
(recruiters, promoters, producers, broadcasters
and etc)
While cultural production and cultural studies
analysis tends to emphasis on the consumption
of culture and mediate it.
Merriam’s The Antrophology of Music (1964)
Discusses the ambiguous social
positions of musicians, describing it as
wandering between marginality and power.
Music (arabs)
- It is a deep belief in the power of music,
that is, the ability to stir the soul and
provoke strong emotions that has
tended to shape perceptions of
musicians and their place in the society.
In all these cases studies, it provides fruitfuls
concepts that elucidate how transcultural
encounters act upon and themselves enacted
through musical practices
THREE COMPONENTS OF MUSIC IN
GLOBALIZATION
1. CONTACT: RE-READING THE HISTORY
OF MUSIC AND GLOBALIZATION
-The globalization of music as a long series of
fruitful, yet violent cross-cultural encounters
that tooks place beyond the north-south axis
and time-frame of of modernity that
globalization as a phenomena to be limited to.
-The term contact has been very useful in
contemporary archaelogy for documenting the
interaction between Europeans and
indigeneous people in the Americas, Africa and
Australia.
-It also tends ro reify the cultural traits,
neglecting the ‘creative,creolized aand novel
cultural products. (Utopian Concept)
-Globalization the discovery of new world.
Journey to the other shore (2006)
-Argues the decentring a largely notes atlantic
interpretation of globalization.
-The Arabic Maqam s, Indian ragas and Persians
radifs which have been canonized as national
tradition are all related in that they can be
traced back to a set of performance practices,
theoretical principle and aesthetic values that
spreads throughout Africa.
-These contracts do not fit, they are therefore
neglected in contemporary histories of
globalizations which tend to focus on the
polarized north-south, east-west axis pitting
civilizations with fundamentally different world
views against each other.
-Cultural exchanges continued for centuries
beyond the fateful date of 1942
-Reciprocal transfer of cultural knowledge and
influence in terms of techniques, styles and
aesthetic value of judgment in arts and crafts
endured over a period of at least three decades.
EXAMPLE:
Frenkcin Frengi feri (1534)
Treaty of King of France, Francois I and
the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magneficient,
the king sent western orchestra to Istanbul as a
sign of friendship. The visit resulted into the
introduction of two new rhythm in Turkish
Music.
-Western music tends to focus on the musical
representation of difference exoticism and
orientalism.
EXOTICISM – attractive through being unusual
ORIENTALISM- imitation on depiction.
-The caricatures and stereotypes portrayed
through the music that are often the reitified
traces of much deeper and complex
relationship.
Tia DeNora ‘refelection theory’
-it do not pay enough attention to the concrete
process that are made these relationship
possible , meaningful and most importantly,
powerful despite their dysfunctional and
asymmetrical nature.
-In the capital cities, their musics met and
mutuality influenced each other, giving birth to
new genres anchored in the urban and
cosmopolitans realities of the imperial
metropolis.
Art music is a sophisticated synthesis of various
regional genres and practices amalgamating
rural, religious, vernacular and other variety.
Transnational Maelstrom pf discplacement
Mediums such as music became the
anchor upon which new imaginaries, identities
and inevitably new audiences took root.
Williams and Pinkneys (1989)
The most important general element of
the innovations in form is the fact of
immigration to the metropolis and it cannot too
often emphasized how many major in novators
were, in this precise sense, immigrants.
2. FRICTION: MUSIC OF BLACK ATLANTIC
Anna Tsing’s Friction
-awkward, unequal, unstable and
creative qualities of interconnection among
differences.
SLAVERY
 Slavery embodies a particular violent
form of contract, as it is rested upon the bio-
politics of intimacy, to commoditized bodies.
Intimacy is laden with the friction, even
more so when it is experienced through
encounter such as violence.
TWO SCHOLAR WHO SOUGHT COMPLEXITIES
OF AFRICAN AND AMERICAN.
Whose repertory of slave spirituals is
considere one of the first instances of black
music entering into the public domain and into
popular culture.
The Jubilee Singers treatment and
transformation of the spiritual to accommodate
aesthetic tastes and expectations of white
audience became central reflection on black
identity

Sociologist; Paul Gilroy

They were not inexpressibly, residual

traces of their necessity painful expression still
contribute to historical inscribed and
incorporated into the volatile core of Afro-
Atlantic cultural creation.

Gilroy’s contributes their power to their

doubleness their unsteady location
simultaneously inside and outside the
conventions, assumptions and aesthetic rules
which distinguish and periodise modernity.

Musicologist; Christopher Small

Country-and-western, reggae, jazz,

punk rock broadway popular songs and calypso
were all brilliant tradition which resulted from
the collision in the Americas, two musical
culture: that of Europe and that of Africa.

These genres emerged out of slavery as

ritual for survival.

EXAMPLE:

Black Atlantic music are the spirituals

that were born out of the Christianization of
slaves in the united States and would eventually
give birth to gospels music after emancipation.

FISK UNIVERSITY JUBILEE SINGERS