Welcome Page | Read Papers | Interactive Conference | Musics and Cultures Research Group
Music Studies and Cultural Difference was the theme of an interdisciplinary conference organised by the Musics and Cultures Research Group of the Open University, and held in London on 2 July 1997. This is an online version of that conference, and the way it works is simple. We have mounted six papers at this conference site: you are welcome to read and print these papers as required; then you are further invited to participate in an online conference, by posting both your reactions to the papers, replies to the comments of others, and any general comments related to the theme of the conference.
Most of the papers are between 1300 and 2300 words in length: authors were asked to be brief, and to make their points succinctly so as to stimulate discussion. (In the case of Keith Harris, we unfortunately have only a 500 word summary, for reasons beyond either his or our control.) We hope that you'll have the time to read all the papers, and that you'll want to join in the conference by posting your comments.
The conference will be active for a limited period of time: we're not setting a deadline at this stage, but once the contributions dry up we'll make it inactive (i.e. read only). As a matter of Open University policy, entry to the interactive conference is password restricted. Follow this link to register for the conference and get your password.
The papers have been edited by Martin Clayton, who is also 'fair witness' (i.e. moderator) of the online conference. Thanks to Trish Cashen and to Ian Trimnell for technical assistance; to the British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE), the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) and Critical Musicology, and their representatives on the conference programme committee Jonathan Stock, Dave Hesmondhalgh and Peter Franklin respectively; to Richard Middleton, co-chair of the original programme committee; and of course to the authors and everyone else who contributed to that event.
Follow this link if you wish to see the original call for papers.
If you wish to cite any of the papers published online, we recommend the guidelines published in Beyond the MLA Handbook: Documenting Electronic Sources on the Internet by Andrew Harnack and Gene Kleppinger. These advise providing the following information:
Model:
Baily, John. "Investigating inter-cultural music perception: Messiaen's
"Le Loriot" and Afghan reception of birdsong." Music Studies and
Cultural Difference Conference Proceedings. 1997.
<http://www.open.ac.uk/OU/Academic/Arts/music/MSCD/baily.html> (10 Feb.
1998).
When we requested papers for this conference, the invitation began as follows:
Music Studies and Cultural Difference will be an interdisciplinary conference, arranged with the aim of establishing dialogue between different branches of Music Studies (including Ethnomusicology, Popular Music Studies and Historical Musicology), Anthropology, Cultural Theory and any other relevant academic fields. It will explore approaches to cultural difference in different disciplines, and ways in which we can learn from each other's methods and findings. 'Cultural difference' will be interpreted flexibly, so that it can be thought of as applying within or across national boundaries: the 'difference' may be (for instance) between cultures, between subcultures, between social classes or between genders.
Of the twenty-something papers proposed, the six represented here were those which best answered that invitation, and collectively gave the best balance of repertoires and academic orientations. Each addresses the theme in a quite different way, and yet each raises pertinent and challenging questions.
John Baily looks at Afghan musicians' responses to recordings of birdsong and of Olivier Messaien's Le Loriot: how would the birdsong-loving Afghans respond to the French composer's birdsong-inspired piece? Kevin Dawe looks at two aspects of cultural difference in Cretan music: the way that musical performance is used to establish gender difference and reinforce male authority, and the invocation of difference by the Cretan music industry as it engages with - and keeps its distance from - the rest of the world. Keith Harris looks at the place of Brazilian Death Metal band Sepultura within a global 'scene', in an attempt to distill a theoretical approach to such 'global' music genres that goes beyond simple ideas of cultural import and export. Nanette de Jong shows how black jazz musicians in two very different regions of the Americas - Chicago and Curaçao - take very different views of the place of Africa in their personal identities, and explains how these different approaches are articulated in their music. Denise Pilmer Taylor's article also looks at jazz, discussing how this black American form was received by Parisian musicians in the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, Martin Scherzinger lays down a challenge to ethnographic approaches to African music: why should we apply close listening and analysis only to Western art music, regarding African music as suitable only for discussion in terms of the social formations it is supposed to reflect?
To be sure, 'cultural difference' is interpreted in several ways: cultural difference in musicians' approaches to a common non-human phenomenon (birdsong); music's role in articulating the difference between 'us' and 'them' - on various levels; the ability of global music genres to apparently transcend cultural difference (at least that conceived in geographical terms); the role of music and musicians in articulating both difference from and affinity with various culture groups, as well as cultural difference in the way that relationship is enacted; the many factors involved in the reception of one nation's music by another, and the ways in which cultural associations are embraced, appropriated, transformed and rejected in the process; the way academic discourse can presuppose and reinforce difference, closing off areas of investigation in the process.
Connections and comparisons are there to be seen on many different levels: between the approaches of different ethnomusicologists; between practitioners and critics of ethnomusicology; between the 'export' of Brazilian Death Metal and that of American jazz; between the approaches of the Curaçaoans and Cretans to the outside world; between the approaches of Messaien to birdsong and Milhaud et al to jazz - both alien music cultures?; and so on. Difference on every level: different music cultures, different responses to difference, different articulations of (different kinds of) difference, different ways of studying those different attitudes to difference. Enjoy the papers, post your comments and let's enjoy the difference of each others' responses.
Martin Clayton