Setting the Scene

2020 ◽  
pp. 41-54
Author(s):  
Aleysia K. Whitmore
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
World Music ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
American Industry ◽  
Culture Industries ◽  
The World ◽  
Points Of View

Part I examines the world music industry from the points of view of European and American industry personnel (e.g., booking agents, record labels personnel, tour managers). Chapter 1 contextualizes the world music industry in the larger music and culture industries. Since its birth in 1987, world music has been a vague category. It has encompassed an enormous variety of music: traditional and folk musics, newly composed traditional musics, and vintage and contemporary popular musics. What, then, is “world music”? Where did it come from? After providing a historical overview of world music through its emergence as a genre category in the 1980s and its growth in the ’90s, the chapter examines how culture industries have, in collaboration with consumers, developed a market for, and expectations of, ethnic “others” in Europe and North America.

Introduction—Collaborations

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Aleysia K. Whitmore
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Music Industry ◽  
Black Atlantic ◽  
Theoretical Background ◽  
World Music ◽  
Global Markets ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Black Internationalism ◽  
The World

The Introduction provides historical and theoretical background for the book. The chapter offers an historical overview of Cuban music in West Africa, and explains how histories and discourses of globalization, cosmopolitanism, Africa, the black Atlantic, and black internationalism intersect. Musicians, industry personnel, and audiences draw on these histories as they collaborate with each other to create international commodities. The chapter argues that all of these actors see their labor and its products quite differently as they move between and combine local and global markets, African and Afro-diasporic sounds, traditional and hybrid musics, and histories of slavery, colonialism, and independence. Musicians, industry personnel, and audiences work with and push against one another as they continually (re)position themselves in the world music industry.

World Music: A Very Short Introduction

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip V. Bohlman
Keyword(s):  
Music Industry ◽  
Folk Song ◽  
World Music ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
National Pride ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Different Cultures

World Music: A Very Short Introduction looks at the history of world music and its many definitions. ‘World music’ is more than a marketing term for the music industry. During the Enlightenment, the idea of the ‘folk song’ encouraged European audiences to imagine music from around the world. Technology helped to create the ‘audio moment’—the transformation of sound into material which could be recorded and distributed worldwide. Throughout history, music has been used to express unity and national pride. World music both foregrounds and transgresses borders. Ideas in different cultures about world music, and indeed about music, are as diverse as ever.

Early Encounters in Bimusicality

2020 ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A Clendinning
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North America ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Early Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Music ◽  
Educational Practices ◽  
The World ◽  
Music Ensemble ◽  
World’S Fairs

The chapter presents an overview of the introduction of gamelan to North America and examines how the ensembles assumed a key role within the philosophy and practice of American collegiate world music education. Musical and cultural exhibitions at world’s fairs, the dispersion of early recordings of gamelan music, transnational performance tours, and the work of Western composers and pedagogues led to the importation of instruments and founding of early academic gamelans. The world music ensemble programs modeled after those founded at UCLA by Mantle Hood embodied a new and important paradigm in ethnomusicology termed bimusicality, as well as sparking the collegiate world music ensemble movement. The chapter concludes with a brief overview of the current gamelan scene in the United States that reconnects the early development of academic gamelan ensembles to contemporary artistic and educational practices.

Frames

2020 ◽  
pp. 151-175
Author(s):  
Aleysia K. Whitmore
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Music Performance ◽  
World Music ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The World ◽  
Market Niche ◽  
Music Genre

Part III examines who world music audiences are and what draws them to Orchestra Baobab and AfroCubism. This chapter sets the scene by offering an ethnography of world music performance venues in Europe and North America. Orchestra Baobab and AfroCubism have performed at Bonaroo, Jazz à Marciac, and WOMAD. They have shared venues with Prince and fun., classic and avant-garde jazz, and Nigerian funk. Venues experiment with how performers can fit into and expand their market niche and image (e.g., cutting edge, worldly, charitable) as they look to attract the most (and right kind of) audiences. The chapter argues that heterogeneous performance frames do not just help redefine the world music genre culture. They offer a path to the label’s destruction—and the music’s reconstruction as a more mainstream genre culture.

scholarly journals The Art of Representing the Other

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-81
Author(s):  
Aleysia K. Whitmore
Keyword(s):  
Music Industry ◽  
World Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
The World

This chapter explores how industry personnel respond to audience and industry expectations by examining the negotiations behind the production of world music. The chapter looks behind and underneath world music products to analyze, not just the effects of representational decisions, but also how people make these decisions—how they negotiate the dynamics of representational and interpretive distortion. Industry personnel work with musicians and audiences to develop products that are authentic and sellable. They play with and push against markers of authenticity that intersect and parallel each other on axes of locality and globality, liveness and mediation, marginality and mainstream, purity and hybridity. Authenticity occupies different positions on these axes depending on musicians’, industry actors’, and audiences’ expectations. As they negotiate this web of expectations, industry personnel reinforce and contest the discourses of alterity, essentialist stereotypes, and unequal power dynamics that continue to be so problematic in the world music industry.

Experiment role in the world music (based on the «The Road» album of the Ukrainian «Dakha Brakha» band)

2018 ◽  
pp. 215-227
Author(s):  
Iia Fedorova
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
World Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern Music ◽  
Musical Practice ◽  
The Road ◽  
Music Practice ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Musical Practices

The main objective of this study is the substantiation of experiment as one of the key features of the world music in Ukraine. Based on the creative works of the brightest world music representatives in Ukraine, «Dakha Brakha» band, the experiment is regarded as a kind of creative setting. Methodology and scientific approaches. The methodology was based on the music practice theory by T. Cherednychenko. The author distinguishes four binary oppositions, which can describe the musical practice. According to one of these oppositions («observance of the canon or violation of the canon»), the musical practices, to which the Ukrainian musicology usually classifies the world music («folk music» and «minstrel music»), are compared with the creative work of «Dakha Brakha» band. Study findings. A lack of the setting to experiment in the musical practices of the «folk music» and «minstrel music» separates the world music musical practice from them. Therefore, the world music is a separate type of musical practice in which the experiment is crucial. The study analyzed several scientific articles of Ukrainian musicologists on the world music; examined the history of the Ukrainian «Dakha Brakha» band; presented a list of the folk songs used in the fifth album «The Road» by «Dakha Brakha» band; and showed the degree of the source transformation by musicians based on the example of the «Monk» song. The study findings can be used to form a comprehensive understanding of the world music musical practice. The further studies may be related to clarification of the other parameters of the world music musical practice, and to determination of the experiment role in creative works of the other world music representatives, both Ukrainian and foreign. The practical study value is the ability to use its key provisions in the course of modern music in higher artistic schools of Ukraine. Originality / value. So far, the Ukrainian musicology did not consider the experiment role as the key one in the world music.

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