Music, Travel and Tourism: An Afterword

Abstract

Discussing the articles in this special issue with reference to the more general literature on tourism and travel , the article presents tourism as a challenging and complex field of study, indicating some of its breadth and diversity and some of the possible directions in which it could go. It argues throughout for more nuanced ethnographic research , such as has emerged over the last decade in the anthropology of tourism, taking into account at least some of the motivations of actors and agents in tourist encounters and exchanges and the specificities of music as a form of social engagement. The article focuses in particular on issues surrounding authenticity and representation , locality, nostalgia, work, leisure, the payment of musicians, and tourism as secular pilgrimage. ethnomusicology puts another awkward subdisciplinary category on the map, but this may not be a bad thing. Music tourism is a growing business1 and some form of labelled critical engagement is entirely in place, especially since music tourism (in all of its complex varieties) habitually draws the musical intelligentsia, ethnomusicologists and otherwise, into complex dilemmas as representatives, interpreters, guides, and even exhibits2. The value of a cumbersome subdisciplinary term, as John Blacking once remarked of the term itself (1976), is to draw attention to its own strategic provisionality. Such terms also remind us of things which, equally strategically, habitual scholarly and everyday usage are inclined to forget (such as the fact that all music, and not just that on designated margins, is ethnic). Tourism is, certainly, a poor term. There are just too many different kinds of travel to be shoehorned into a single category. But the term does condense a knot of problems relating to how in modernity experiences of movement are valorised and aestheticised or demonised and pathologised, how difference is constructed and managed in situations of extreme commodification and cultural reflexivity, and how and under what circumstances communication takes place across the gaps difference establishes. There is a sense, then, in which the term usefully draws attention to its own inadequacies and the problems that cluster round it. The problems remain compelling. Travelling to listen (or be heard), as opposed to travelling to look, involves an impossibly complex dance of mutually constituting

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