Two broad areas of consensus reign on matters of musical globalization.One,I'll refer to as 'popular', the other 'critical'.The popular consensus goes something like this.Advances in communication technologies over the last four decadesby which I mean increases in their power, capacity and reach, coupled with their miniaturization and distribution across the social fieldhave wrought fundamental changes in the way music circulates.Musics confined to localities now circulate across the globe.Musics that languished in archival obscurity can now be accessed at the click of a mouse.Musics once perceived as foreign and outlandish have become familiar.Isolated musical practices now interact with others, producing energetic new hybrids, global soundscapes.Cultural hierarchies have been toppled as societies reckon with unexpected new sounds coming from without or below.Once we were locals: now we are cosmopolitans.Now we have choice, agency, democratic possibilities for exchange and interaction.And a pleasurable vantage point on the musical goings-on of the world, a feast to enjoy.This visionone I connect with the 'world music' or 'world beat' phenomenon of the mid to late 1980s, and the publications that continue to give it life (The Rough Guide to World Music, The Virgin Directory of World Music, the Songlines journal)was not without its ambiguities and anxieties.Traditions and 'roots' need to be validatedbut how, and by whom?If hybridization and musical translation are the new creative principles, how are musical intelligibility and meaning to be maintained, by whom, and for whom?How is diversity and cultural in-between-ness to be celebrated, without eroding core identities?Who are to be the gatekeepers, the explainers, the interpreters, the go-betweens, the intellectuals?Who are to be the guardians of propriety and fairness as the recording industry and it superstars sink their teeth into vulnerable local communities?One could continue in this vein, and chose almost any page of the publications mentioned above to illustrate the anxieties at play.They have a long history, from the 1960s to the present day, at least, as the idea of 'world music' has taken root in various institutional, public and commercial spaces in the western worldacademia, the recording business, public broadcasting, state and municipal arts funding.And whilst I have presented something of a caricature, I think they are serious anxieties, thoughtfully pursued by many of those involvedpeople I have been in conversation with throughout my years as an ethnomusicologist.Let me quickly sketch out what I think of as the critical consensus.This will take a little more time, since I think the positions held are more varied, and these variations have a bearing on what I want to say later on.One critical issue relates to the role of the recording industries in shaping (and controlling) musical globalization.This is a complex matter.In its earliest days, the recording companies (The Victor Talking Machine Company, established in 1901, the Gramophone Company, in 1898) marketed a new sound reproduction technology.They did so globally, using local sounds, in local languages, as a means of developing local markets for their productr.Italian opera arias by star vocalists (notably Caruso) constituted the first music to circulate in these markets translocally, supplanted by the dance band orchestras of the I920s and 30s, as developments in recording allowed.As the recording industries consolidated themselves in subsequent decades, they became the dominant institutional site of global musical exchange, over which they have, consequently, exercised considerable control.For many, then, questions about musical globalization must necessarily involve a critical and historical analysis of how the recording industries function on a global basis, and how we are to understand the circulation of the commodities they produce.How do they attempt to exploit particular regional and diasporic marketst.Ho* have various geffes been selected, appropriated and promoted for global circulation3.How have they have connected their big stars with small soundsa.How have recorded sounds been sampled, copied, appropriate, reinventeds.How do the activities of local music recording companies selling local music for a global market reproduce, or intensify, the racial or gendered status quo?o How do they participate in their own marginalization and dependency on metropolitan markets?'And how, finally, was the idea of a 'World Music' developed, and why?Was it a key moment in the transformation of the global recording industries as they struggled to orient themselves to, and exploit, the rapidly changing soundscapes of first world cities?8 Or a comparatively minor chapter in the history of recorded music dreamed up by a bunch of enthusiasts in various areas of commercial and public media to pursue rather more idiosyncratic goals that need to be understood in more local terms?eThese kind of questions about musical globalization are well-developed within ethnomusicology and popular music studies, tied as they are to t There is a large and valuable literature on this topic.Here I draw on Gronow and Englund 2007.'On French recording company Barclay and their efforts to exploit the North African diasporic market and rai, see Schade-Poulsen 1999, Gross et al 2003.' The case of tango is particularly well documented.See in particular Saviglianol995.a Paul Simon's appropriation of South African isicathamiya on his 1986 Graceland album is a cause celebre in ethnomusicology.See Meintjes 1990 and Erlmannl999 for different interpretations.5 Consider, for instance, the lullaby from the Soloman Islands originally recorded Hugo Zemp relocated in the music of Deep Forest and Jan Garbarek, discussed in Feld 2000a, or the complex circulations of Simha Arom and Colin Turnbull's 'pygmy' recordings in the world of western pop and rock (Feld 2000b).See Hesmondhalgh 2000 and Taylor 2003 for other carefully considered case studies.6 On the gendered dimensions of positioning a local music on a world market, see Aparicio 2000; on racial issues, see, particularly, Meintjes 2003.7 See Guilbault's study of Antillean zouk (Guilbault 1993) for a discussion of dependency.8 A position I would associate, in rather different ways, with Frith 2000 and Schade-Poulsen 1999.e Brusila's 2003 Nordic case study epitomizes this approach.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 85 citations exist upstream.