5. Music in a global world

This chapter discusses the relationship of music to colonization and globalization. In the colonies music contributed to the legitimizing of hegemony, while at home it functioned as a means of representing foreign cultures, generally portraying them as both different and inferior. This illustrates how music can serve the ends of cultural and political ideologies, but it can equally be a means to neutralize, resist, or interrogate power. It can also be an instrument of modernization and nation building, as illustrated by the example of China. The chapter then considers examples of cross-cultural interaction and hybridization, ranging from classical and modernist music to the development and globalization of popular musics; it outlines a number of alternative conceptions of ‘world music’ that range from the commercial to the speculative. A concluding section returns to the Prudential commercial with which the book opened, assessing the value of music in contemporary society.

4. Music 2.0

This chapter explains the role technology plays in all music: digital technology is simply its most recent manifestation. After reviewing the basics of digital sound, the chapter outlines the transformational effect of digital technology on musical culture. Particular attention is given to its impact on personal musical consumption, including the development of streaming libraries and music recommendation systems, and on the development of internet communities based on digital participation; a result has been the development of a distinctive ‘digital style’, illustrated for example by internet memes. Finally the chapter outlines the historical development of the music business, and the radical ways in which it has been—and is being—transformed by technology.

2. Thinking in music

This chapter examines how the culture of music involves a system of established metaphors that culture members share—what may be loosely called a language. This is the condition of writing, talking, or thinking about music, but more than that, it is the condition of music’s existence as cultural practice and product. The chapter explains the way musicians internalize properties of instruments and notations: these are key ways musicians think not just about but in music. Finally the chapter illustrates the creative imagination at work through the example of Beethoven, whose compositional process—based on the piano and on sketches—became central to a whole tradition of thinking about classical music.

Introduction

This introduction describes a forty-second television commercial for Prudential pension plans in order to illustrate music’s ability to convey complex cultural meanings. Music encodes values, people’s cherished beliefs about the world they live in; it is an entertainment, one of life’s great pleasures. But it also penetrates deep into society, culture, and identity. Placing equal emphasis on music as real-time performance and the processes of creative imagination in music, the second edition of this VSI has been almost completely rewritten to reflect the major transformations of music that have resulted from digital technology and from globalization.

1. Music in the moment

This chapter focuses on music’s existence in real time. On the printed page, music is a series of notes fixed in the same relationships for all time. But as played and heard, music is a world of ‘endless movement, not discrete “forms” but continuous “forming”’—a world of lived experience that expresses human relationships in their most essential, stripped-down form. The chapter discusses the role of improvisation in both jazz and classical music, and the relationship between knowledge and practice as illustrated by historically informed performance (HIP); it also considers music’s ability to bring about social bonding and the political significance it acquires from this, whether in national anthems or protest songs.

3. The presence of the past

This chapter traces a number of key ideas going back to the 18th century that still condition music and thinking about it today. It largely focuses on classical music, but situates it in relation to popular culture. A distinction is drawn between ‘classical’ (small-C) and ‘Classical’ (big-C) music: Classical (big-C) music is a narrower term referring to a particular series of developments centred on Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the late 18th and early 19th centuries—developments in which Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven played a key role, and which eventually led to the idea of music as its composer’s self-expression. The chapter also traces the emergence of a very different idea of what music is and what it is for, centred around the consumption rather than the creation of music: linked to major social and technological changes, this has given rise to today’s culture of musical pluralism.