Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music
David Hesmondhalgh
Language: English
Pages: 409
ISBN: 0520220846
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The essays scrutinize a diverse body of music and discuss a range of significant examples, among them musical modernism's idealizing or ambivalent relations with popular, ethnic, and non-Western music; exoticism and orientalism in the experimental music tradition; the representation of others in Hollywood film music; music's role in the formation and contestation of collective identities, with reference to Jewish and Turkish popular music; and issues of representation and difference in jazz, world music, hip hop, and electronic dance music.
Written by leading scholars from disciplines including historical musicology, sociology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music studies, and film studies, the essays provide unprecedented insights into how cultural identities and differences are constructed in music.
Enquêtes sur les modes d'existence: Une anthropologie des Modernes
Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (Phoenix Books)
Local Knowledge: Further Essays In Interpretive Anthropology
Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche
The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol
the major culture critics who were exegetes and apologists for formalist modernism: Adorno for music, and Greenberg for painting. Adorno’s infamous attacks on the “primitive” and degraded nature of mass culture, and writings by Greenberg such as “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” reveal an underlying hostility to and repudiation of the culture of the “masses” that are latent in the claims of “absolute otherness.”41 This is a discourse that, far from being extinct, has continued to be reproduced in the
theorization of music and identity and, by implication, difference.7 But the aim of this book is to foster further conceptual development by thinking across a number of these questions, which have often been treated separately.8 Importantly, it addresses them in relation to both art musics and popular musics, proposing that we may learn from the comparative exercise of tracing exoticism through the practices of early-twentieth-century French composers (see Pasler’s essay) to those of
conduct an exercise in cultural relativism but to contribute to a reflexive critique of Western music and music history. Others are now writing analyses of musics and hybridities that are not dominant forms or centered in the West, sketching the outlines of a history that traces different roots/routes and spaces and in this INTRODUCTION 47 way answers back to Western dominance.125 While the present book does not contribute much to that project, this does not imply a view on our part that only
for Papageno’s magic bells (especially in his act 2 aria and the subsequent Finale) reminds us of this, as it fuses together the magical and the mechanical: the childlike Papageno (unreflective, easily amused) plays at rationality. So simple is this child of nature that, in the act 2 Finale, united at last with his Papagena, the two of them can only stutter (“Pa—pa—pa”), as if relearning the power of speech.23 But Papageno can be taught. In act 1, as he struggles to speak through his padlocked
example 2.5).76 Thayi was a famous devadasi singer whom Delage had the pleasure of hearing live during a visit to the temples at Mahabalipurnam.77 Arulpa are devotional songs that the devadasis sang for the entertainment and pleasure of the gods at the temples to which they were attached. Thayi recorded many of them.78 Her recordings are full of elaborate passages of closed- and open-mouthed singing, microtonal ornaments, and long stretches in which she might change the timbre but not the pitch
