The music culture, the globalization and American popular culture
Week 2: What is music? What is culture? What is globalization?
-Theories of cultural globalization, diaspora, and cultural hybridity.
-New technologies and the movement of mediated music around the world.
-Music and cultural boundary crossings.
9/3 Mark Slobin & Jeff Todd TIton (1992), World of Music, Chapt. 1: “The Music-Culture as a World of Music,” 1-15.
The experiment mentioned by Vee today:
“Joshua Bell and the Washington Post Subway Experiment”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZeSZFYCNRw
The four components of a music-culture.
I. Ideas about music.
A. Music and the belief system: What is music (and what is not)? Is music human or divine (or both)? Is music good and useful for humankind? Is it potentially harmful?
B. Aesthetics of music: When is a song beautiful? When is it beautifully sung? What voice quality is pleasing, and what grates on the ear? How should a musician dress? How long should a performance last?
C. Contexts of music: When should music be performed? How often? On what occasions?
D. History of music: Why is music so different among the world’s peoples? What happens to music over time and space? Does it stay the same or change, and why? What did the music of the past sound like? Should it be preserved? What will the music of the future be?
II. Social organization of music What is it like [in such-and-such music-culture] to experience music as a teenage girl, a young male urban professional, a rural grandmother of German ethnic heritage living on a farm?
III. Repertories of music
A. Style. What style and aesthetics create a recognizable sound that a group understands as its own?
B. Genres What are the named, standard units of the repertory, such as “song” and its various subdivisions (e.g., lullaby, Christmas carol, wedding song) or the many types of instrumental music and dances (jig, reel, waltz, etc.)?
C. Texts What words accompany the music? How doe the words intersect the music?
D. Composition How does music enter the repertory of a music-culture? Is music composed individually or by a group? Is it fixed, varied within certain preset limits, or improvised spontaneously in a performance?
E. Transmission How is music learned and transmitted from one person to the next, from one generation to the next? Does the music-culture rely on formal instruction? Is there a system of musical notation? Does a body of music theory underlie the process of formal instruction? How much is learned informally, by imitation? Does music change over time? If so, why and how?
F. Movement What physical activity accompanies the music? Playing a musical instrument, alone or in a group, involves physical activity in producing the sound, but what culturally specified movement inseparable from the music itself are also produced?
IV. Material culture of music What are the tangible, material “things” that a culture produces?Examining a culture’s tools and technology can tell us about the group’s history and way of life. What things transmit or disseminate the music? Instruments? Sheet music? Radio? Television? Microphones? Computers?
9/8 Lane Crothers (2013), Globalization and American Popular Culture, 17-32.
Definitions and concepts
globalization social processes that transform social conditions into one of globality (p. 18)
globality a social condition of interconnectedness that makes economic, political, cultural, and environmental borders and boundaries irrelevant (p. 18)
fragmegration the simultaneously occurring fragmentation and integration that shapes globalization and affects different communities around the world in uneven ways (James Rosenau, p. 18)
popular culture “a business run by megacorporations and marketed across the globe” (p. 19)
American popular culture a conduit of cultural globalization that adapts and reflects back values, ideas, and experiences to/from the world at large (p. 19)
free trade a view in economic theory that there should be little to no restraints on the flow of goods, services, and even people around the world (p. 20)
comparative advantage the theory that goods and services should be made wherever they can be cheapest (p. 20)
sovereignty the right of a nation-state to impose whatever laws it desires on its people
cultural corruption the view that mass communication promotes ideas to individuals who, without traditional anchors such as the family and the church, are alienated and are vulnerable to manipulation (p. 26-28)
cultural imperialism the view that interaction of different cultures will inevitably lead to conflict and result in cultural domination, provoking both the “McWorld” ideology of a cosmopolitan and sophisticated world integration based on free trade as well as metaphysically defined and fanatically defended partisan identity (p. 28-29)
cultural homogenization the view that American popular culture and mass consumer capitalism will dominate the world and that as a result, cultural diversity will be lost forever; everyone will eventually eat the same food, wear the same clothes, read the same books (p. 29-30)
cultural hybridization “‘the ways in which forms become separated from existing practices and recombine with new forms and new practices'” (p. 43)
glocalization (1) “‘massive, twofold process involving the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism‘” (2) “a process in which established cultures both shape and are undermined by the emergence of a new cosmopolitan culture whose values and ideals are to a large degree determined by the demands of globalization.” (p. 31)
identity “how individuals and groups define their values, ideals, and communities”
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