Introduction to the special issue: Music and Tourism

Abstract

Music, in various styles and permutations – instrumental and vocal, solo or group, amplified or acoustic, formats – live and recorded, performances and venues, is a near universal and ubiquitous cultural expression. Musical genres are a product of human culture, something cherished for their aesthetic value, and yet also something that is the site of contestations of meaning and purpose across history, social and geographical spaces. In many ‘pre-modern’ cultures, music is bound tightly with rituality and sociality, the performance of belonging and power. In modernity, music has become part of the everyday spaces of leisure, a source of artistic expression and audience pleasure – but also a cultural product that is capable of being sanitised and commodified. Music articulates identities, rebellion, conformity, performance, status, product, community, subculture, high culture, distinction, place, space and more. In the construction of distinctive spaces, styles and genres, music reproduces the inequalities and struggles of the late modern world. The social and artistic status of musical genres, composers and performers ranges from the historical, canonical and ‘great’ such as Beethoven and the Beatles to contemporary forms that may be deemed by some to be tasteless ‘muzak’, subversive and socially divisive, for example, punk and ‘death metal’ from which we need to be

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