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My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: World music and the commodification of religious experience
During the 1990s and 2000s, ‘world music’ became a contentious topic in ethnomusicology, with polarised exchanges of ‘anxious’ and ‘celebratory’ narratives. Recently, this debate has subsided, and many academics and industry actors have discarded the controversial label. However, attempts to simply bury the discourse are futile because the politics of ‘world music’ continues to play out within the industry. The problem with the debate was not necessarily the label itself, but the abstract and generalising narratives which simplified discussion of ‘world music’ production and consumption and excluded the voices of its participants. Applying the concept of ‘envoicement’ to WOMAD, I show that musicians value this festival as a platform for getting their voices — literal and metaphorical — heard. I argue that, by revealing perspectives which problematise past narratives, an ethnographic approach guided by envoicement could help to nuance understandings of the industry and break through the critical deadlock.
This paper discusses how different ways of defining the ontological status of recorded sound have developed throughout the 20th century. My claim is that even within the period of analog technology, sound recording was moving away from its purposes of preserving and documenting real life musical performances. I will illustrate this by using three different examples. First, I will look at how John and Alan Lomax´s folkloristic documentation of blues music in the 1930s changed the very culture they documented by introducing a new medium that enabled the sharing and dissemination of music beyond the word of mouth. Secondly, I will look at how the producer John Culshaw redefined the recording of classical music in the 1960s by moving away from the ideal of documenting an actual performance and towards the use of technology to brake previous constraints imposed on the musicians and create an improved version of the musical work. Lastly, I will look at Brian Eno and David Byrne´s My life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981), which utilized tape splicing technology to create a blend of western funk and pop with field recordings of non-western folk music and various other sound sources.
In the 1990s, clubs in Western Europe featuring remixed Romani music began to drawn large crowds of young people. This article analyzes the production of this soundscape, often trademarked as "Balkan Beats," by a growing DJ subculture, comprised of dozens of performers on five continents. Focusing on the most famous DJ, Shantel, I explore musical marketing via issues of representation and political economy. I highlight the tenuous position of Roma in this music scene where nonRoma dominate as artists, producers, and consumers. Appropriation provides a critical lens to investigate Shantel's claims to hybridity and multiculturalism via his mythical personal history.
Scholars have long known that world music was not merely the globalized product of modern media, but rather that it connected religions, cultures, languages and nations throughout world history. The chapters in this History take readers to foundational historical moments – in Europe, Oceania, China, India, the Muslim world, North and South America – in search of the connections provided by a truly world music. Historically, world music emerged from ritual and religion, labor and life-cycles, which occupy chapters on Native American musicians, religious practices in India and Indonesia, and nationalism in Argentina and Portugal. The contributors critically examine music in cultural encounter and conflict, and as the critical core of scientific theories from the Arabic Middle Ages through the Enlightenment to postmodernism. Overall, the book contains the histories of the music of diverse cultures, which increasingly become the folk, popular and classical music of our own era.
In the second half of the 20th century, Texas-Mexican conjunto music changed from a highly localized and often stylistically stagnant regional genre to an innovative musical style increasingly popular among an international audience. This widespread artistic acknowledgment was largely stimulated by the participation of Flaco Jiménez on Ry Cooder’s Chicken Skin Music in 1976, drawing certain superficial parallels with the following world music movement through the underlying suggestion of inequitable cultural appropriation. However, this case instead demonstrates that the increasing contemporary mixture of cultures, even among socio-economically inequitable groups, can alternatively produce a valuable and mutually advantageous cross-cultural consequence.
L'A. relit et critique «Le Don» de M. Mauss du point de vue de la mimesis schizophonique de la musique Pygmee. Sa lecture porte sur la moralite turbulente des relations actuellement de plus en plus contestees entre formes d'invention musicale et formes d'echange culturel. Il critique Mauss, en se fondant sur les travaux de Colin Turnbull et en precisant comment les actes d'echange schizophonique creent simultanement des liens puissants tout en produisant des divisions egalement puissantes. Il s'agit d'une histoire des pratiques et discours musicaux qui relie l'Afrique coloniale et post-coloniale aux mondes de la musique, particulierement via le nouveau genre global de la musique pop : nombres de musiciens Pop ou de Jazz des annees 1960-70 se sont inspires, ont imite ou se sont approprie les melodies, techniques vocales, rythmes, arrangements musicaux, etc. des peuples de la foret equatoriale d'Afrique centrale regroupe sous le terme generique de pygmee