Product Description

This innovative collection of articles offers a major comprehensive overview of new developments in cultural theory as applied to Western music. Addressing a broad range of primarily twentieth-century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowings or appropriations, and how music has been used to construct, evoke, or represent difference of a musical or a sociocultural kind.
The essays scrutinize a diverse body of music and discuss a range of significant examples, among them musical modernism's idealizing or ambivalent relations with popular, ethnic, and non-Western music; exoticism and orientalism in the experimental music tradition; the representation of others in Hollywood film music; music's role in the formation and contestation of collective identities, with reference to Jewish and Turkish popular music; and issues of representation and difference in jazz, world music, hip hop, and electronic dance music.
Written by leading scholars from disciplines including historical musicology, sociology, ethnomusicology, anthropology, popular music studies, and film studies, the essays provide unprecedented insights into how cultural identities and differences are constructed in music.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #654193 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 409 pages

From the Inside Flap
"[Western Music and Its Others] will be taken as an important book signalling a new turn within the field. It takes the best features of traditional, rigorous scholarship and brings these to bear upon contemporary, more speculative questions. The level of theoretical sophistication is high. The studies within it are polemical and timely and of lasting scholarly value."--Will Straw, co-editor of Theory Rules: Art as Theory/ Theory and Art

"The great value of this collection lies in the wealth of questions that it raises--questions that together crystallize the recent concerns of musicology with force and clarity. But it also lies in the authors' resistance to the easy 'postmodernist' answers that threaten to turn new musicology prematurely grey. The editors' comprehensive, intellectually adventurous introduction exemplifies the sort of eager yet properly skeptical receptivity to scholarly innovation that fosters lasting disciplinary reform. It alone is worth the price of the book." --Richard Taruskin, author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through " Mavra"

"When cultural-studies methods first appeared in musicology 15 years ago, they triggered a storm of polemics that sometimes overshadowed the important issues being raised. As the canon wars recede, however, scholars are finding it possible to focus on the concerns that led them to cultural criticism in the first place: the study of music and its political meanings. Western Music and Its Others brings together leading musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and specialists in film and popular music to explore the ways European and North American musicians have drawn on or identified themselves in tension with the musical practices of Others. In a series of essays ranging from examination of the Orientalist tropes of early 20th-century Modernists to the tangled claims for ownership in today's World Music, the authors in this collection greatly advance both our knowledge of specific case studies and our intellectual awareness of the complexity and urgency of these problems. A timely intervention that should help push music studies to the next level." --Susan McClary, author of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (2000)

"This collection provides a sophisticated model for using theory to interrogate music and music to interrogate theory. The essays both take up and challenge the dominance of notions of representation in cultural theory as they explore the relevance of the concepts of hybridity and otherness for contemporary art music. Sophisticated theory, erudite scholarship and a very real appreciation for the specificities of music make this a powerful and important addition to our understanding of both culture and music." --Lawrence Grossberg, author of Dancing in Spite of Myself

From the Back Cover
"[Western Music and Its Others] will be taken as an important book signalling a new turn within the field. It takes the best features of traditional, rigorous scholarship and brings these to bear upon contemporary, more speculative questions. The level of theoretical sophistication is high. The studies within it are polemical and timely and of lasting scholarly value."-Will Straw, co-editor of Theory Rules: Art as Theory/ Theory and Art "The great value of this collection lies in the wealth of questions that it raises--questions that together crystallize the recent concerns of musicology with force and clarity. But it also lies in the authors' resistance to the easy 'postmodernist' answers that threaten to turn new musicology prematurely grey. The editors' comprehensive, intellectually adventurous introduction exemplifies the sort of eager yet properly skeptical receptivity to scholarly innovation that fosters lasting disciplinary reform. It alone is worth the price of the book." -Richard Taruskin, author of Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through " Mavra" "When cultural-studies methods first appeared in musicology 15 years ago, they triggered a storm of polemics that sometimes overshadowed the important issues being raised. As the canon wars recede, however, scholars are finding it possible to focus on the concerns that led them to cultural criticism in the first place: the study of music and its political meanings. Western Music and Its Others brings together leading musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and specialists in film and popular music to explore the ways European and North American musicians have drawn on or identified themselves in tension with the musical practices of Others. In a series of essays ranging from examination of the Orientalist tropes of early 20th-century Modernists to the tangled claims for ownership in today's World Music, the authors in this collection greatly advance both our knowledge of specific case studies and our intellectual awareness of the complexity and urgency of these problems. A timely intervention that should help push music studies to the next level." -Susan McClary, author of Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (2000) "This collection provides a sophisticated model for using theory to interrogate music and music to interrogate theory. The essays both take up and challenge the dominance of notions of representation in cultural theory as they explore the relevance of the concepts of hybridity and otherness for contemporary art music. Sophisticated theory, erudite scholarship and a very real appreciation for the specificities of music make this a powerful and important addition to our understanding of both culture and music." -Lawrence Grossberg, author of Dancing in Spite of Myself

About the Author
Georgina Born lectures on the sociology of culture at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Emmanuel College in Cambridge. She is the author of Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (California, 1995). David Hesmondhalgh is Research Fellow in Sociology at the Open University.

Customer Reviews

Impressive, but Frustrating as well.
Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh have edited an impressive volume, "Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music." Distinguished by its multipart and very dense Introduction, the work seeks to serve as a literature review and signpost for those interested in sources and hidden centers in both western art and popular music.

The volume's essays, including many by long-standing cultural music scholars such as Richard Middleton, Simon Frith, and Philip Bohlman, seek several main goals. First, to apply portions of Orientatlist and Postcolonial theory to art and popular musics, seeking to identify in the traditions the twin poles of how Western ideology has traditionally sought the "Other"---as Same (assimilation), or as absolute Difference (projection). To this end a historical approach is used by several contributors. Second, to examine points of rupture, such as between subaltern musics, Western Modernist Art Music (like Schoenberg) and Experimental music (such as John Cage) for ways in which autonomy and difference from each other's traditions was demonstrated and non-Western music's role to that end. Third, this volumes seeks to at least temporarily collapse the distinction between Art and Popular music, so that questions about representation can be asked with regard to how both these music treat each other and other Others with regard to issues such as essentialisms, nationalisms, and race, within a global capitalist context.

While essays on the art music tradition were helpful, I found that Middleton, Frith, and John Corbett's essays to be of the most important, so I'll spend most of my time there. Middleton is concerned with combining postcolonial critiques of assimilating and projecting the Other with a psychoanalytic cultural role for the Imaginary (the realm of repressed forbidden denied desires). At the same time, he identifies two strategies of resistance -- subaltern musics showing mastery of form by signifying of projections, and also deformation of mastery by constructing alien spaces against assimilation.

Bartok, Mozart, musical blackface in Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess," and others undergo this treatment. Even projections like Duke Ellington's 1929 "Japanese Dream," "Arabian Lover," and his "jungle-band" tongue-in -cheek work "Diga-Diga-Doo" at Harlem's Cotton Club are analyzed. Middleton then brings in African-American literary theory to point out how black artists such as Ellington and Ladysmith Black Mambazo take these representations of the Other and Signify on them for their own uses and agendas. Moreover, he notes Abraham Ibrahim (Dollar Brand) 's work which uses South African popular styles and European musical cliches to construct a space of multivalent open-endedness out of European closure. In this way. Middleton contends that while music can never authentically belong to us (it resists a final interpretation) we can make ourselves at home in it through these sorts of processes.

John Corbett's contribution misses not a beat, recognizing that Orientalist forms have long since been reappropriated and redeployed again and again. Seeking some underdetermined sense of how this has operated in the Experimental Music tradition, Corbett focuses on John Cage, who in his mind began with an inventive, scientific, and indeterminate approach, seeking to free sounds from socio-political concerns. Not sure I buy this interpretation, especially when the "irrationalist" Cage, by Corbett's own admission, and widely held knowledge, read freely among Buddhist and Indian philosophies, the contemporary Esotericism of Aldous Huxley's "The Perennial Philosophy," the nature writings of Thoreau and the anti-modernist works of Duchamp. When Corbett morphs this experimentation into a explorationist, conquering colonialist trope, he may be right--but it is more due to the study of Zen koans rather than any methodological scientific functionalism. While notable for its scope. Corbett is sometimes caught in the authenticity game he accuses others of playing--as when he approves of using "world musics" as inspiration for an artist to make "his own music."

Thankfully he sees that Cage used Other musics to disrupt Western musical preoccupations, more than for their "exotic" appeal, as did Steve Reich and others who sought inspiration rather than imitation. When Corbett tackles Brian Eno and Jon Hassell, he is more successful in framing the power politics of Jon Hassell's utopian Fourth World, an imaginary space where musics can freely intermix and national boundaries dissolve. For Corbett Hassell and Eno are merely imitators. His attempt to deconstruct Eno and Byrne's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", however is a failure, as the record's direct quotation of recorded sources approaches Signification rather then Orientalist exoticism. Corbett is reductive, attempting to place the "exotic... echoey" someplace. Except that isn't particularly sounding like anyplace else or any combination thereof, certainly not an "Oriental" space in the Edward Said sense.

If you can't trace where the Orientalism is from, then you should start to at least suspect that it actually might not be there. Otherwise, your interpretive analysis sounds like little more than an article of faith. And that really is the key here. Corbett, as an article of faith, is unmovably pessimistic about the possibility of any cross-cultural inquiry under any circumstances, as opposed to say works of 'surreal anthropology,' as well as Victor Turner, James Clifford, George Marcus, and David Toop. By the time he gets to John Zorn, who actively supports and finances the release of indigenous musics, he's lost his steam. By taking liner notes out of context and holding Zorn and New Albion Records to a standard of unrealistic verbal expression in order to avoid the charge of Orientalism--well, its just not credible any longer.

David Hesmondhalgh's essay explores the politics of appropriating sections of indigenous sounds as backing vocals and possible unity chants for foregrounded Western vocals, along with dance pulses, tabla-playing, and other elements of transglobal dance hall music. Hesmondhalgh correctly recognizes that the "world music" wave of the 80's was derided in the music press for its concern with "authenticity," but suggests that the same politics are at work in music that deliberately cultivates playful pastiche in the 90's as well. Hesmondhalgh is not the first to take sampling by artists such as Peter Gabriel to task for musical "borrowings" (Timothy Taylor, in particular, devotes extensive time to it). Nor is he the only one to point out the ethical problems that arise when artists sampled are not or cannot be paid. But he is notable for ethically accepting the role of live musicians to be used in recordings, rather than samples. Some have argued that any representation of "ethnic" music, even when credited and paid for, is still something of a postcolonial crime--the prime example being Paul Simon and his albums Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints. Yet at the same time Hesmondhalgh questions the notion of racial ownership, even via the shared experience of hegemony. So its unclear that any use or ground would be legitimate. D.H. just isn't consistent on this issue of whether musical hybridity is morally justifiable or not.

Frith's contribution (along with Middleton's) is the most satisfying one--as he unpacks the myth of "World Music" marketing in the late 1980's and 1990's-which was inextricably wound with concerns over marketing, commericial appeal, and perhaps most of all, authenticity. In fact, the recruitment of ethnomusicologists as field researchers and respondants for World music field guides placed the question of agency, gatekeeping, and cultural imperialism at the very center of the category. But the question runs both ways, as indigenous musicians appropriated Western musics for their own agency and power as well. This hybridity, for Frith, is the sound of the "Global Postmodern," with internal contradictions, power struggles, and politics in every direction, from accomodation to resistance to appropriation. Even as the boundaries of West and not-West are reproduced and maintained though, the question of authenticity remains. Are "world musicians" the only ones capable of playing these musics authentically (as Timothy Taylor maintains), or does that too simply reproduce the Other as absolute difference between "authentic" and "inauthentic"?