Has Globalisation Changed The Disposition Of Music Cultural Studies Essay

Has Globalisation Changed The Disposition Of Music Cultural Studies EssayTo begin with the orbicularisation of medicament, we will aim to understand that Intuitively, globularization is a operation fuelled by, and resulting in, change magnitude ill-tempered-border flows of goods, function, gold, great deal, in imageation, and culture (Held et al. 199916). Sociologist Anthony Giddens (199064 199121) proposes to regard world(a)ization as a decoupling or distanciation amid space and time, while geographer David Harvey (1989) and political scientist James Mittelman (1996) observe that globoseization entails a compression of space and time, a shrinking of the conception. The discourses over globalization of medicinal drug constructed over these pass ons of Giddens and Harvey.When we talk or so globalization, we ar in a whizz talking active unity of the states across the globe. How this unity is brought up? Then how does it link the states together? What argon the ma jor contri preciselyors in this combi earth exhibit? Along with a myriad of intellectuals I will withal sum- up with an answer, global- culture. However, it is one of the measures required for the unification border. peerless set of theorists, who atomic number 18 pro-global- culture say, that the global culture is making the demesne closer and to a greater extent united. The people of the world argon combining their differences and being more conjunct towards one and slightly other. This process of emerging global culture bunghole be seen in times of need when everyone has pulled together to strive for peace and u zero(prenominal)namenteddom. Although, there exists a wide range of religions of which people be becoming tolerant, forming a homogenised society.If we say that the global culture is the synonym of the common culture, because there are wide range of opinion on it. fauna uses the term common culture so loosely that it is unclear whether he has in mind a deep, historic sense of culture, or the more superficial agreed rules that compose a contractual society. (James 1993 277-8) Alan James, System or society?, Re fit of Inter discipline Studies 19 3, 1993. I argue that to plastered extent global culture is a common culture among the people of the world.Worldbeat is a term for various styles of world general symphony, or start out, that are practiced outside the European-American mainstream. The universal medicinal drug ( medical specialty upgraded and marketed on a mass-commodity basis) root age emerged in the early 1900s, during which time numerous distinctive familiar symphony styles began to develop around the world. The rise of such genres was linked to dramatic transformations-especially urbanization and modernization-occurring throughout the world. Such changes disrupted customsal attitudes, lifestyles, and forms of artistic patronage, while creating hot urban hearty classes with crude melodyal theater tastes.As per Terence Lancashire, The term world harmony usually conjures up images of practice of medicines from remote corners of the world. However, that remoteness is non evermore geographical and can. The formal emergence of world euphony in 1987 as a commercial g privation denoting a body of music which hitherto defied conventional categorisation namely musics other than popular and classic forms from due 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 clarify the combat-readys that underlie the output and reception of world musics and the related and manytimes indistinguishable genres of untested age and healing. Regional case studies and overviews (e.g. Frith 1991 Keil and Feld 1994 Taylor 1997) often draw attention towards the resemblanceship betwixt the West and the rest where proceedsion and presentation of non-Wester n music has often meant some form of Western control in terms of discovery, production, marketing and scattering. Accusations of heathenish exploitation and appropriation keep, therefore, often run pennyral to the debate on what appears to be yet another dimension of that unbalanced and uneasy relation between the first and triplet worlds. In reality, the question of who is exploiting whom is often a complicated one as non-Western musicians find access to markets hitherto yet dreamt of. Nevertheless, in order for such melodious projects to be realised, financial relief is essential and it is here that resources are, more often than not, concentrated inthe West. Thus, a music flow from south to north and east to west seems to define the world music equation. Yet, there are other players who, through pagan am hugeuity, gratify an alternative arena less easily defined. Economic development in the Far East, coupled with rapid modernisation, has meant the emergence of countr ies which share similar sparing goals, heathenish interests and perceptions with the West but, resulting from other cultural differences, most obviously language, are not so often included in debates on musics some(prenominal) popular and world. (Lancashire 21)Globalisation, which generally implies westernisation and the Asianisation of Asia, is often posited to be a culturally, sparingally, technologically and socially homogenising force in the distribution of music, whilst topical anaesthetic anestheticisation refers to the empowerment of topical anesthetic forces and the (re)emergence of topical anesthetic music cultures. These two notions of globalization and localisation of function seem to be mutually contradictory, posing a fundamental dilemma for the understanding of the transformation of popular cultures into global forms. As argued by Law (forthcoming), the debate between globality and locality, or between homogeneousness and heterogeneity in globalisation disco urse, could be regarded as a product of similar antagonisms in the literature of development concerning theories of modernisation, habituation and world systems. Although there is no clear definition or place of globalisation (Hirst and Thompson 1996), its discourse attempts to theorise the phenomenon in terms of The temp spontaneous and spacial compression of human activities on the globe, to recognise, research and explain the interaction and interdependence of economics, politics and cultures beyond local, regional and content boundaries, and to predict possible deviates on human activities (Law, forthcoming, also see, for example, Featherstone 1995 Comeliau 1997 Poisson 1998 Jones 1999 Crawford 2000 Croteau and Hoynes 2000). Cohen (1995) shows that locality could be most usefully use in popular music studies to discuss networks of social dealingships, practices, and processes extending across particularized places, and to draw attention to interconnections and interde pendencies 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 also to a shared sense of place within global culture. Globalisation promotes the meeting of musical cultures, whilst concurrently encouraging regional differences. Local popular industries perceive their potential sense of hearing in international terms, and local pop markets are forthwith full 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 submit a widespread experience of dislocation (Jenkins 2001, p. 89).For example, contemporary Afro-pop sometimes links the electrical guitars of Western shake up and roll with melodies and rhythms of usageal African music, whilst Western rock drummers have long adopted a tradition from Africa whereby the sounds of different 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 mixed racial, national or linguistic back fuzes. 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 convey of musical products with global features strikes at the heart of the major social and political issues of our time. This is how B ennett (1999) represents the attempts to work hip hop as a localised mode of boldness by Turkish and Moroccan youth in Frankfurt. Economic globalisation is often considered to undermine the local foundations of the popular culture industry. The flow of smashing 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 net income 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 record companies (Source http//www.grayzone.com/ifpi61201.htm). Furthermore, the international persona of labour and the global circulation of commodities have ensured that processes of production an d consumption are no longer confined to a geographically bounded territory. Consequently, economic globalisation has been characterised as the deterritorialisation. ( Ho 144) (Appadurai 1996) or denationalisation (Sassen 1996) of nation-states.Global economic forces continue in global networks that link different nations and cultures in profit-maximising vanes of production, stellar(a) 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 course to target the most economic 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 relation s between global space and local space (p. 116). Levitt (1983) explains that localisation is practised by multinational companies insofar as they must have a committed operating presence in the markets of other nations.However, electronic communications have also enabled the global broadcast medium of messages of universal peace and love, and, in the case of www. indymedia.org, have even served as anti-capitalist noticeboards. Anderson (1983) suggested that the nation depends for its existence upon a sense of social- psychological affiliation to an imagined community, which was facilitated by the emergence of the mechanical printing press and consequent capital investiture (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 hale illustrated by the 11 phratry 2001 tragedies in New York and Washington D.C. The US-American national anthem was thundered N ot 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. global popular artists such as U2, Britney Spears, hopple 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 pertain 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 determines a great number of processes that change and even excel 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, sounds, capital, people, etc. Through the engineering science of global networks, new affinity group formation emerge, centring on particular musical styles and shipway of expression. Economic globalisation alship canal 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 argument for the present story is the consequences of the globalisation of music as to the convergence of societies towards a uniform bod of cultural organization. AS expressed in modernization theory, the spread of markets and technology is predicted to c ause 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 particularistic. For example, Viviana Zelizer (1999) about the economy that it differentiates and proliferates culturally in much 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 differentiate 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 association with authorized places in an increasingly global society?If these questions could be answered the music 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 talllighted in the successive integration of twain MUSIC and identities, from separation to fusion demonizing exclusion, primitivist polarization, diversifying crossing 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 diffus ion of such a process, if such a process of cultural breakd take in were to keep evolving, we would have to face a global consumer monoculture.AMERICANISATION Westernisation or polarisation of musicAnother argument of the discourses on the globalisation of music is that the music which is going global is by and large Americanised. iodine of the major business organisations 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 integrated culture, including the music industry, is destroying local tradition, knowledge, skill, mechanics 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 drivel 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 beat out 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 sightly a burden and an overstepping of bounds. These factors can create an educational environment as well as a reaffirmation of ones get culture. With the music being the highly profitable, capitalist enterprise that it is today, it is no appreciation that it is controlled and regulated by a few large con glomerates.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 pleasant of threat on the originality of the music. Growth of a profitable and varied music services industry producing everything from remixes to music marketing strategies. Standing at the school principal 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 normal 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 dousing in music (1990, 1993),reports that seven corporations together controlled no less than 50 percent of market share in any country where they had trading 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 deny 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 strike 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 sound appraisal of the dynamics of the music industry (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 worldwide sales of US$29 000 million, prevail 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 USA (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 music 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 coloured underworlds of urban taverns and brothels. As such styles grew in edification, 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 outlay (l930a 16) to the slovenly and immoral music called jazz, which he regarded as crude, negroid in form and vulgar. Even the sensitive scholar Kunst referred to the partially West ern-derived genre of Indonesian kroncong as a monotonous and characterless wail,listing it as one of the causes why the native is either dying away or degenerating (ibid.) Some writers have indulged in a romantic zeal to save traditional music everywhere from the contamination that was often supposed to result from musical butt 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 mere wester canon. For Bunge, the new and global is to be celebrated because it is popular and materialization 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 re cording in its turn stimulates an increase preoccupation within the culture with questions of musical identity, all of which provides fertile ground for ethnomusicological research. The ensuing detective work is aimed not at flushing out cases of inauthenticity, but at uncovering ever more pieces of a multi-dimensional jigsaw well-fixed in unexpected meetings and happy accidents and documented in different ways by field recordings and commercial recordings alike. While some of the groups identify themselves only with the notion of the tradition, regardless of what they are actually doing in practice, others are kinda clear that they are simply doing what they want to do and resent the guile of the spectre of tradition as a restrictive framework (e.g. Minicale hearing 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 h earing 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 proceed 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 top-notch 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 soaring 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 repertory and reluctant to pass on th eir 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 singers can empower themselves as and when they are ready to do so.( Bithell 62)Globalisation of musicJ. Mc Gregor impudent 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 toss off that which might 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 foresee that individuals will be enabled increasingly to transcend the strictures of the local in order to participate in what is understood as the quite 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 best 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 impose homogeneity but rather will illuminate and foster the local. This particular knowledge of contemporary social trends finds an especially keen illustration in a new book by Andy Bennett. In Popular Music and offspring 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 popul ar music constitutes a cultural text that has a meaning independent of its audience. Social 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 reflexive agents who interpret and appropriate popular music in ways that are critical and creative. As a consequence, the meanings of musical texts should be acknowledged not as singular and given but rather as plural and contested. The particular reading advanced within Popular Music and Youth Culture insists not only that social actors shackle critically with popular music but that they do so in the main 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, easily 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 musicalised forms of social practice would seem to suggest, therefore, that the kindred of the global to the local is a complex one not of sanction but rather of dialogue. (See Willet review)African American musical adaptations create the roots of blues, jazz, and other genres of modern music in the United States. exclusively 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 cr iteria against which all music can be judged are rooted in the musical languages of ruling groups privileging the sheer over the popular and the masculine against the feminine. Such cultural distinctions were brought to bear 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 delightful 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 likewise 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.