Has Globalisation Changed The Disposition Of Music Cultural Studies Essay

Has Globalisation Changed The Disposition Of Music Cultural Studies EssayTo begin with the orbiculateisation of melody, we will agree to experience that Intuitively, sphericalization is a process fuelled by, and coreing in, increasing cross-border flows of goods, services, m acey, people, information, and culture (Held et al. 199916). Sociologist Anthony Giddens (199064 199121) proposes to regard world(a)ization as a decoupling or distanciation between space and time, trance geographer David Harvey (1989) and policy-making scientist James Mittelman (1996) observe that globalization entails a compression of space and time, a shrinking of the field. The discourses solely over globalization of medication constructed over these debates of Giddens and Harvey.When we talk closely globalisation, we ar in a sense talking about unity of the states across the globe. How this unity is brought up? Then how does it link the states together? What atomic number 18 the major contribut ors in this unification process? Along with a myriad of intellectuals I will as well sum- up with an answer, global- culture. However, it is superstar of the measures required for the unification process.One set of theorists, who argon pro-global- culture say, that the global culture is making the world closer and more united. The people of the world are combining their differences and being more cooperative towards one and other. This process of emerging global culture can be seen in times of need when everyone has pulled together to strive for peaceableness and freedom. Although, there exists a tidy range of religions of which people are becoming tolerant, forming a homogenised society.If we say that the global culture is the synonym of the common culture, then there are all-embracing range of opinion on it. Wight uses the term common culture so loosely that it is unclear whether he has in mind a deep, historical sense of culture, or the more superficial agreed rules that c ompose a contractual society. (James 1993 277-8) Alan James, System or society?, Re setting of Intertheme Studies 19 3, 1993. I argue that to certain ex ecstasyt global culture is a common culture among the people of the world.Worldbeat is a term for various styles of world popular music, or pop, that are practiced outside the European-American mainstream. The Popular music (music produced and marketed on a mass-commodity basis) first emerged in the early 1900s, during which time numerous distinctive popular music styles began to develop around the world. The rise of such genres was linked to dramatic transformations-especially urbanization and fashionrnization-occurring throughout the world. Such changes disrupted impostal attitudes, lifestyles, and forms of artistic patronage, while creating new urban kindly classes with new musical theater tastes.As per Terence Lancashire, The term world music usually conjures up images of musics from remote corners of the world. However, that remoteness is not always geographical and can. The dinner gown emergence of world music in 1987 as a commercial gloss denoting a body of music which hitherto defied conventional categorisation namely musics other than popular and classic forms from North America and Western Europe or, alternatively, the incorporation of such musics into Western popular genres, has met with a variety of responses from musicologists/ethnomusicologists seeking to get through the dynamics that underlie the production and reception of world musics and the related and almosttimes indistinguishable genres of new age and healing. Regional case studies and overviews (e.g. Frith 1991 Keil and Feld 1994 Taylor 1997) often draw worry towards the similitudeship between the West and the rest where production and presentation of non-Western music has often meant some form of Western control in terms of discovery, production, market and distribution. Accusations of heathen exploitation and appropriation ha ve, therefore, often run central to the debate on what appears to be yet another dimension of that unbalanced and uneasy relation between the first and third worlds. In reality, the question of who is exploiting whom is often a complicated one as non-Western musicians find access to markets hitherto tho dreamt of. Neverthe little, in order for such musical projects to be realised, financial backing is essential and it is here that resources are, more often than not, concentrated inthe West. Thus, a music flow from southerly to north and east to west seems to define the world music equation. merely, there are other players who, through ethnical ambiguity, occupy an alternative arena less easily defined. Economic development in the Far East, coupled with rapid new-madeisation, has meant the emergence of countries which parcel similar economic goals, heathen interests and perceptions with the West but, resulting from other cultural differences, around obviously language, are no t so often included in debates on musics both popular and world. (Lancashire 21)Globalisation, which generally implies westernisation and the Asianisation of Asia, is often posited to be a culturally, economically, technologically and socially homogenising force in the distribution of music, whilst topical anaestheticisation refers to the endowment of topical anesthetic forces and the (re)emergence of local music cultures. These two notions of globalisation and localisation seem to be mutually contradictory, posing a fundamental dilemma for the taste of the transformation of popular cultures into global forms. As argued by Law (forthcoming), the debate between globality and vicinity, or between homogeneity and heterogeneity in globalisation discourse, could be regarded as a product of similar antagonisms in the literature of development concerning theories of modernisation, dependency and world systems. Although there is no clear definition or model of globalisation (Hirst and Thompson 1996), its discourse attempts to theorise the phenomenon in terms of The temporal and spatial compression of kind-hearted activities on the globe, to recognise, explore and explain the interaction and interdependence of economics, politics and cultures beyond local, regional and national boundaries, and to predict possible influences on human activities (Law, forthcoming, in any case see, for subject, Featherstone 1995 Comeliau 1997 Poisson 1998 Jones 1999 Crawford 2000 Croteau and Hoynes 2000). Cohen (1995) raises that locality could be most usefully used in popular music studies to discuss networks of social relationships, practices, and processes extending across particular(a) bases, and to draw attention to interconnections and interdependencies between, for example, space and time, the contextual and the conceptual, the individual and the collective, the self and the other (p. 65). In this respect the local is defined by reference not only to a community, but in addition to a shared sense of place within global culture. Globalisation promotes the meeting of musical cultures, whilst simultaneously encouraging regional differences. Local popular industries perceive their electromotive force audience in international terms, and local pop markets are now awash with global sounds, since, as Wallis and Malm (1984) maintain, globalisation encourages popular musical practices to look towards global styles for possible inspiration, whilst also looking inwards to (re)create national music styles and forms. For decades, critics have depicted the international circulation of American and British pop as cultural imperialism. Yet US-American and British youth have increasingly been shaped by Asian cultural. Similarly, there is wide-spread recognition of the willingness amongst popular musicians to create novel forms that express a general experience of dislocation (Jenkins 2001, p. 89).For example, contemporary Afro-pop sometimes fuses the electric g uitars of Western rock and roll with melodies and rhythms of traditional African music, whilst Western rock drummers have long adopt a tradition from Africa whereby the sounds of vary drums are combined (Croteau and Hoynes 2000, p. 333). Jenkins (2001) describes such musical eclecticism as the product of third culture youths, who fuse elements from interracial racial, national or linguistic backgrounds. Although the big international music companies affect local production, their markets are also influenced by particular local cultures. So, globalisation signifies more than environmental interconnectedness, and the meaning of musical products with global features strikes at the heart of the major social and political issues of our time. This is how Bennett (1999) represents the attempts to rework hip hop as a localised mode of expression by Turkish and Moroccan youth in Frankfurt. Economic globalisation is often considered to undermine the local foundations of the popular cultur e industry. The flow of enceinte through transnational monetary tems and multinational companies means that words, ideas, images and sounds of different cultures are made available to vast networks of people through the transmission of electronic media. Among the most prominent multinational electronic media companies are two Internet partnerships MusicNet, involving AOL, RealNetworks, EMI, BMG and Warner and Duet, incorporating Yahoo, Universal and Sony. The two most recognised online music providers so far, Napster and MP3.com, have also linked up with eternalise companies (Source http//www.grayzone.com/ifpi61201.htm). Furthermore, the international division of labour and the global circulation of commodities have ensured that processes of production and consumption are no longer confined to a geographically bounded territory. Consequently, economic globalisation has been characterised as the de territorialisation. ( Ho 144) (Appadurai 1996) or denationalisation (Sassen 1996) o f nation-states.Global economic forces reside in global networks that link different nations and cultures in profit-maximising webs of production, leading to the transformation of all sectors of all state economies and their mutual accommodation in the global context (Crawford 2000, pp. 71-2). Negus (1999) maintains that the global market is a concept that has to be constructed in a particular way to target the most profitable categories of music within the recording industry (p. 156). However, as we have seen, the (re)emergence of local cultures competes with global factors in a process that Morley and Robins (1995) refer to as the new dynamics of re-localisation in The attempt to achieve a new global-local nexus, about new and intricate relations between global space and local space (p. 116). Levitt (1983) explains that localisation is practised by multinational companies insofar as they mustiness have a committed operating presence in the markets of other nations.However, electr onic communications have also enabled the global broadcasting of messages of universal peace and love, and, in the case of www. indymedia.org, have even served as anti-capitalistic noticeboards. Anderson (1983) suggested that the nation depends for its instauration upon a sense of social- psychological affiliation to an imagined community, which was facilitated by the emergence of the mechanical make press and consequent capital investment (Negus and Roman-Velazquez, 2000, p. 330). Similarly nowadays, global electronic communications can evoke a sense of a trans-national imagined community. In music, an example can be well illustrated by the 11 September 2001 tragedies in New York and Washington D.C. The US-American national anthem was thundered Not only all over the States but also in other countries, such as at St Pauls Cathedral in London. Whitney Houstons record company intends to re-release her version of the US-American national anthem that was produced ten years ago during the Gulf War. International popular artists such as U2, Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit and Destinys Child, worked together for the album Whats Going On, the market profits from which will be donated to funds for the relief of the families of victims of the tragedies of September 11. John Lennons Imagine, which evokes a world free from all state boundaries, has now become popular even in some non-English speaking regions, and was sung by all the artists involved in the Carlsbergs Rock Music Concert held in Hong Kong on 24 September 2001, who also prayed for those who died in the disaster two weeks earlier.Globalisation and localisation are in a dynamic dialectic. Globalisation is a process of local hybridisation that tempts a heavy(p) number of processes that change and even transcend the regional and national characteristics of popular music. Current debates about globalisation in popular music show that local actors become increasingly involved in global flows of meanings, images, s ounds, capital, people, etc. Through the technology of global networks, new affinity group formation emerge, centring on particular musical styles and ways of expression. Economic globalisation always has cultural effects on the localisation of popular music. (Ho 146) Hudson and Cohen bring out the detail of local musical cultures, the way in which music, produced through and producing space, may act as social glue.(431)Does globalisation of music produce convergaence?The very first line of merchandise for the present study is the consequences of the globalisation of music as to the convergence of societies towards a uniform pattern of cultural organization. AS expressed in modernization theory, the spread of markets and technology is predicted to pay off societies to converge from their preindustrial past, although total homogeneity is deemed unlikely. The sociologists reject the convergence debate by arguing that globalization homogenizes without destroying the local and the pa rticularistic. For example, Viviana Zelizer (1999) about the economy that it differentiates and proliferates culturally in often the same way as other spheres of social life do, without losing national and even international connectedness. Robertson (199534-35) sees the global as the linking of localities.Issues of music getting de-territorialisedOther argument is that the original is getting lost in the wake of globalisation. Other sets of arguments which emerge from this view are How do listeners identify music with a particular place? The evolution and geographic distribution of instruments, use of specific melodies or scales, and existence of common rhythms are some key characteristics that help define and limit the territorial range of a music.How common traits can provide telltale clues about where a form of music originated and how it spread?How can music retain its connective with certain places in an increasingly global society?If these questions could be answered the mus ic could be retained as intact.IDENTITIES Music and its originOther argument flows that in a globalised village, where is the identity of the music? Four basic positions are highlighted in the successive integration of both MUSIC and identities, from separation to fusion demonizing exclusion, primitivist polarization, diversifying hybridization and normalizing assimilation.Lomax also states that due to the widespread distribution of industrialized music and the loss of music that exemplifies cultural aspects and characteristics, civilizations are not maintaining a sense of national pride and identity. Without these distinguishing lines, Schiller states that at one time it was cultural diversity that flourished, and now we are witnessing the diffusion of such a process, if such a process of cultural breakdown were to backing evolving, we would have to face a global consumer monoculture.AMERICANISATION Westernisation or polarisation of musicAnother argument of the discourses on the g lobalisation of music is that the music which is going global is by and large Americanised. One of the major fears associated with the globalization of music is the creation of a global monoculture. Barlow investigates how the global monoculture has infiltrated every corner of the earth. He feels that North American corporate culture, including the music industry, is destroying local tradition, knowledge, skill, artisans and values. Specifically artisans have been affected through the fact that the product that they have tried to market has been outdated and overrun by the popstar garbage that has taken over the world and destroyed cultures. The premise of Barlows argument finds that this is corporate America is not only destroying traditions, but it is burying a cultures general identity. As best said by Nawal Hassan, a Egyptian artisan activist, This is an issue of identity. All our civilizations has ceased to be spiritual. Our civilization has become commercial. (Barlow 2001)I came up with the view that People arguing over the loss of a nations cultural identity, the terror of westernization, and the reign of cultural imperialism. Through topics such as these we explore the possibilities or the existence of hybridization of cultures and values, and what some feel is the exploitation of their heritage. One important aspect that is not explored that such influences can also be more than just a burden and an overstepping of bounds. These factors can create an educational environment as well as a reaffirmation of ones own culture. With the music being the highly profitable, capitalist enterprise that it is today, it is no wonder that it is controlled and regulated by a few large conglomerates.COMMERCIALISATION Consumerism of musicAnother issue of debate is that the transnational corporations are making money on music, whether the music is twisted or re-mixed. So it is a kind of threat on the originality of the music. Growth of a profitable and varied music se rvices industry producing everything from remixes to music marketing strategies. Standing at the forefront of this growth industry are a large number of firms attempting to combine in innovative ways music and ICT. This can take a variety of forms, for instance selling and distributing music over the internet web plan and computerised advertising services tailored to music products software design focused on multimedia products and virtual instruments high-tech post-production and mixing services and virtual centres and communities of music industry actors.Brunnette in empirical studies of market concentration in music (1990, 1993),reports that seven corporations together controlled no less than 50 percent of market share in any country where they had operations and up to 80 percent in some countries (199104-5).The seven corporations, with their nation of origin and reported 1990 sales, areSony (Japan, $3 billion), Time/Warner (U.S., $2.9 billion),Polygram(Netherlands/Germany, $2.6 billion), Bertelsmann Media Group (Germany, $2 billion),Thorn/EMI (U.K., $1.88 billion),MCA(U.S., $1 billion), and Virgin (U.K., $500 million), total 1990 sales $13.88 billion (1993, pp. 141-143).With no. such as these it is nearly impossible to recant the fact that these companies do not have a great affect on the influence of music and media that they distribute. Conglomerates not only run the market for music,but determine which music is to be distributed and to where, therefore pushing an idea or culture onto a nation. Seeing that westernization has become a industry term for many businesses it is move that recently much of the profit that has been received from music conglomerates has been non-U.S. artists.The contemporary music industryThe making of music is not only a cultural and sociological process but an economic one. However, economic geography perhaps because of a lingering productivist bias has yet to undertake a serious appraisal of the dynamics of the music indust ry (see Sadler 1995). Trends of globalization, internal corporate restructuring and global-local relations are, however, as evident here as in other sectors. In 1992, the music industry generated ecumenic sales of US$29 000 million, dominated by just five major global corporations Warners, Bertlesmann Music Group, Polygram International Group, EMI-Virgin and Sony. Seventy per cent of world record sales were generated in just five national markets, each dominated by the majors which between them captured 73 per cent of sales in the regular army (31 per cent of the global market), 60 pe cent of sales in Japan (15 per cent), 90 per cent of sales in Germany (9 per cent), 73 per cent of sales in the UK (7 per cent) and 87 per cent of sales in France (7 per cent) (Monopolies and Mergers Commission 1994). (Leyshon. Mayshell, Revill 427)Music and traditions?The music is a tradition? It is another issue of debate. Because there are other instances which suggest that sometimes the popular m usic of a place was against the traditions. In some cases, as with jazz, Greek rebetika, and the Argentine tango, the emergent popular music styles came from the colorful underworlds of urban taverns and brothels. As such styles grew in sophistication, they came to attract the interest of cultural nationalists and middle-class enthusiasts. Eventually these styles shed their less reputable origins and developed into dynamic national genres. Powne (1968vii-viii) referred to a debased or Westernized music in Ethiopia, and Price (l930a 16) to the slovenly and immoral music called jazz, which he regarded as crude, negroid in form and vulgar. Even the stark naked scholar Kunst referred to the partially Western-derived genre of In through with(p)sian kroncong as a monotonous and characterless wail,listing it as one of the causes why the native is either dying away(p) or degenerating (ibid.) Some writers have indulged in a romantic zeal to save traditional music everywhere from the contam ination that was often supposed to result from musical contact between the West and the non-West.Fryer (ibid., 482) laments cuts in musical education, For Fryer, the environment of pop is an anti-culture with universally commercialized African rhythm undermining the universal cultural standards of the classical wester canon. For Bunge, the new and global is to be celebrated because it is popular and young Fryer (ibid, 482) chastises a resurrection by a professed radical of the discredited economic doctrine of consumer sovereignty. (Leyshon. Matless, Revill 424)Caroline Bithell says, The world music marketplace opens up a new area of representation of a culture by its own participants, while the high density of recording in its turn stimulates an increased preoccupation within the culture with questions of musical identity, all of which provides fertile ground for ethnomusicological research. The ensuing investigator work is aimed not at flushing out cases of inauthenticity, but at uncovering ever more pieces of a multi-dimensional jigsaw rich in unexpected meetings and intellectual accidents and documented in different ways by field recordings and commercial recordings alike. While some of the groups identify themselves completely with the notion of the tradition, regardless of what they are very doing in practice, others are quite clear that they are s indicate doing what they want to do and resent the imposition of the spectre of tradition as a constrictive framework (e.g. Minicale interview 1994). They do not in any case view the tradition as something fixed this can only lead to ossificationbut as a continually evolving organic entity which needs to find contemporary forms of expression (e.g. Poli interview 1995). (Bithell 61) They feel that they should not be held to ransom by the notion of tradition or More precisely by other peoples perception of their tradition. (They remain concerned, nonetheless, that they should be seen as being grounded in the tradition.) What is at stake is not what is done but the way in which the traditional label is appropriated. At the same time, the concept of tradition itself is clearly flexible and contested and does not necessarily imply either great age or superior status. (The alternative designation popular does not share this problem but, in the modern media age, creates new difficulties. It also fails to bestow a sufficiently elevated aura.) at that place is also a danger of idealising or romanticising the workings of the oral tradition where songs were passed down directly from one generation to the next. In reality, the process did not always run smoothly. Some older singers were jealous of their repertoire and reluctant to pass on their secrets to younger singers. In many places, singing remained the prerogative of the older men (Sarrocchi interview). The availability of commercial recordings means that some of these human difficulties can be by-passed and the younger generations of sing ers can empower themselves as and when they are ready to do so.( Bithell 62)Globalisation of musicJ. Mc Gregor Wise Music is a landscape in which people negotiate their identities.There is prevalent a view that the growing ease with which capital and commodities cross international boundaries will serve to erode and perhaps even obliterate that which big businessman be considered local. This particular conviction invokes a range of starkly different political responses. On the one hand, there are high modernists like Anthony Giddens who forewarn that individuals will be enabled increasingly to transcend the strictures of the local in order to participate in what is understood as the rather richer environs of a global community forged out of the communications revolution (Giddens 1991, pp. 1467 1998, p. 36). On the other, there is a swelling band of critics who fear that globalisation entails simply the homogenisation of cultural practice and taste. These anxieties are captured be st perhaps in the lucid polemic of Naomi Klein (2000). While the contention that trans-national forces are inexorably eroding that which is particular to given societies exercises considerable appeal, it has of course been challenged in various quarters. Some social scientists have sought to suggest that the process of globalisation will not in fact oblige homogeneity but rather will illuminate and foster the local. This particular reading of contemporary social trends finds an especially keen illustration in a new book by Andy Bennett. In Popular Music and Youth Culture we encounter a distinctive conception of the ways in which the social world is experienced and understood. The author sets out to challenge the view that popular music constitutes a cultural text that has a meaning independent of its audience. friendly actors are not Bennett insists mere cultural innocents who passively consume the wares of the music business. On the contrary, he argues, people are in fact refle xive agents who go out and appropriate popular music in ways that are critical and creative. As a consequence, the meanings of musical texts should be acknowledged not as gay and given but rather as plural and contested. The particular reading advanced within Popular Music and Youth Culture insists not only that social actors engage critically with popular music but that they do so principally in the context of the local. This is defined throughout the text not as a demarcated physical space but rather as a set of discourses. The specific discursive practices through which the local is called into being are, Bennett asserts, near associated with the production and consumption of popular music. Those musical texts that originate elsewhere are routinely read through sensibilities that emerge out of a specific understanding of place. These particular sensibilities are themselves, however, heavily influenced by exposure to musical texts that originate else- where. Looking at musicali sed forms of social practice would seem to suggest, therefore, that the relationship of the global to the local is a complex one not of dominance but rather of dialogue. (See Willet review)African American musical adaptations formed the roots of blues, jazz, and other genres of modern music in the United States. But elsewhere in the Americas, especially in the Caribbean and Brazil, drums remained integral to the black musical tradition. In these areas, African music has mixed with both indigenous and non-African traditions to produce a variety of musical styles, including calypso and reggae.Further Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, George Revill, talk about universal and national music. Shepherd, the assumed fixed criteria against which all music can be judged are rooted in the musical languages of ruling groups privileging the classical over the popular and the masculine against the feminine. Such cultural distinctions were brought to ingest both within and beyond thewest.n Leppert and McClary (1987, xviii) show how such formulations have legitimized western sophistication and complexity against the primitive and suggest that ethnomusicological questioning of music and society has been pleasant only when applied to other cultures recognizing that other musics are bound up with social values does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that our music as well as might be more often it simply results in the chauvinistic, ideological reaffirmation of the superiority of Western art, which is still widely held to be autonomous.