Migrating Music

Jason Toynbee, Byron Dueck, Jason Toynbee, Byron Dueck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415633598
• eBook ISBN: 9781136900938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Migrating Music considers the issues around music and cosmopolitanism in new ways. Whilst much of the existing literature on 'world music' questions the apparently world-disclosing nature of this genre – but says relatively little about migration and mobility – diaspora studies have much to say about the latter, yet little about the significance of music.

In this context, this book affirms the centrality of music as a mode of translation and cosmopolitan mediation, whilst also pointing out the complexity of the processes at stake within it. Migrating music, it argues, represents perhaps the most salient mode of performance of otherness to mutual others, and as such its significance in socio-cultural change rivals – and even exceeds – literature, film, and other language and image-based cultural forms.

This book will serve as a valuable reference tool for undergraduate and postgraduate students with research interests in cultural studies, sociology of culture, music, globalization, migration, and human geography.

1 Migrating music

Jason Toynbee and Byron Dueck

Migrating musicians

In 2010 the Senegalese hip-hop group Daara J Family were refused entry into the United Kingdom: they had not demonstrated that sufficient maintenance funding would be available to them during their stay. Robin Denselow, a contributor to this volume, described the circumstances in an article in the Guardian (Denselow 2010), noting that paperwork was just one of the difficulties that non-European musicians faced in travelling to the United Kingdom. He quoted a representative from Daara J Family’s record company, who expressed dismay that the musicians would not be present in the country for the launch of their own album. And he suggested that British music fans might find it increasingly difficult to hear live performances by musicians from outside the EU. The story suggests some of the circumstances that hold at the time of writing: the increasingly stringent immigration regulations that have accompanied a growing nativism, an economic recession, and anxieties regarding European multiculturalism. But it also reveals a context of global movements and fascinations, in which musicians and genres circulate, the latter increasingly in mass-mediated form, and in which musicians and audiences alike are enchanted by the music of the other (as seems evident in the case of Senegalese musicians performing an African-American genre for British music fans). In short, it points to the complex set of interlinked objects herein described as ‘migrating music’.

First, and perhaps most obviously, the story highlights migrants: in this case musicians seeking to cross a border to make their livelihood. The present volume, and especially the first part, ‘Migrants’, dwells on people who move physically to new places. It considers musicians and listeners, moving voluntarily and involuntarily, temporarily and permanently, with papers and without. It examines how they maintain musical connections to home, but also how they reconcile their musical practices to new and unfamiliar contexts. Of course, not all migrants are musicians, let alone professionals who sell recordings and concert tickets. Even fewer are successful enough to make a living primarily through such activities. Accordingly we are concerned with amateurs as well as experts, and listeners as well as performers.

That Daara J Family is a hip-hop group points to a second kind of musical movement, namely travelling styles, instruments and techniques. In the three or so decades since the emergence of rap, the genre has spread globally, as has the technology to make it (and indeed many associated elements, including dance styles, clothing and graffiti art). Daara J Family’s appropriation of rap is hardly a rare instance of a migrating musical practice. Indeed, the group’s music evinces the influence of other, earlier-circulating genres, including reggae and soul. And of course musical styles and technologies travelled long before contemporary forms of mass mediation: African instruments (including drums and precursors of the banjo) and African stylistic characteristics (including complex interlocking rhythmic patterns) came to the Americas along with African slaves. Consequently, even very different practices like rap, reggae and Senegalese traditional music share certain common elements of African musical style, and these similarities partly account for how amenable such genres are fusing with one another, as they do in the music of Daara J Family. There are abundant examples of ‘foreign’ musical styles enchanting musicians and listeners across lines of cultural difference. Shortly, we consider the complex dynamics of such appropriations and exchanges in terms of mimesis, a generative impulse to copy the music of the other. Further along, the second part of this volume, ‘Translations’, is devoted to the subject of genres in cross-cultural motion.

A third kind of musical movement has implications for the first two. It is mediation: the circulation through print, broadcast, recording and various forms of electronic dissemination of musical objects that are separable in time and space from human subjects yet continually available for activation and engagement by them (see Silverstein and Urban 1996). Mediation has had important implications for migrants and migrant communities. It has allowed them to preserve musical practices from home, and to remake them in new contexts. For instance, North American immigrant communities have both preserved and cultivated valued song repertories through hymnals (see the contributions by Roeber, Bohlman, and Wulz in Bohlman and Holzapfel 2002). More recently, mediating technologies have permitted migrants to keep in touch in a nearly instantaneous manner with musical happenings vast distances away. Email, digitized music files and video hosting sites permit migrants to track the latest trends and dance moves from back home, and just as importantly to celebrate and create a shared musical history with distant intimates.¹ Mediation has also allowed migrant communities to join, and play a part in constructing, musical networks, that is ‘scapes’ (Appadurai 1996) or ‘publics’ (see Warner 2002) that cross regional and national boundaries.² Here the ‘old’ medium of radio remains a crucially important channel, as the essays in Part 3, ‘Media’, demonstrate through what is an extended case study of the BBC World Service. While mass mediation enables all sorts of world-making activities, it is nevertheless also the means by which important musical disparities are perpetuated. Through mediation the music industry has given the most fortunate musicians – in large part, although not exclusively, from Western countries and advantaged backgrounds – the ability to address immense and far-flung audiences. Their works and performances have been made available to people and communities around the world, and rarely in any sort of reciprocal way.

Some of the foregoing aspects of mediation are again evident in the case of Daara J Family. Interviewed by Newsweek, Faada Freddy, one of the founding members of the group, remarked:

The first time we heard American rap, it sounded no different from [tassou, a traditional genre practised in Senegal]. Our theory is that it traveled to America during the slave era. It was slumbering in the deepest part of their souls, and then one day it was awakened. It reminded them of their roots. Then it conquered the world. And now it’s back home.

(Ali 2005)

The quotation suggests that mediation has allowed black musicians to become aware of their historical and musical connections to people in countries and communities far from their own. Faada Freddy’s theory that Senegalese music slumbered silently for centuries in the souls of African-Americans might not stand up to a literal interpretation (although certainly, as noted earlier, African elements have been preserved in African-American musical practices). But his history does suggest one of the possibilities of mass mediation discussed above: namely the opportunity it presents musicians to build upon or even invent links with the music of other, imagined, musicians far away. Faada Freddy’s account undertakes multiple crossings of the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993), binding the music of Senegal and America together in a shared history. Certainly his rhetorical work might be interpreted as a canny strategy, on the part of an ‘outsider’, to position his practice as an authentic and ancient version of the American hip-hop tradition – thus locating himself at the centre of it. But it does other work too: it contributes to the growing storehouse of discourses, performances and recordings that move between black populations on either side of the Atlantic, helping to constitute an international network of diverse, circulating black expressive practices. If, following the work of recent theorists of public culture, publics (or ‘imaginaries’) come into being through the circulation of mass-mediated performances and publications (see Berlant 2008; Warner 2002), Daara J Family is contributing to the ongoing work of building an international black music public. Finally, Faada Freddy’s words point to some of the disparities that exist between mass-mediated performances and genres: some kinds of music ‘conquer the world’ while others seem to have much poorer chances. It is to such structural inequities we now turn.

Political economy and history

The globalization which has enabled networks of migrating music (such as the black music public just discussed) is of course nothing new: Marx (1967) famously described it in 1848 in The Communist Manifesto. More recently Immanuel Wallerstein (1995) has traced the origins of a ‘capitalist world-system’ to the seaborne empires launched from Europe in the late fifteenth century. But whatever chronology we use, the systematic interconnection of formerly remote parts of the world is clearly a precondition for many musical migrations. And it is capitalism and its precursor, mercantilism, that have been major engines in creating these networks, and in encouraging the circulation of European musical genres and instruments within them. Today, while global capitalism persists in its essential features, centres of power are changing, and the system itself seems to be becoming more unstable as deregulation and privatization proceed apace. Indeed, as Andrew Glyn (2006) puts it, in the neo-liberal conjuncture of the late 1970s and after, we confront ‘capitalism unleashed’. There are two repercussions for migrating music.

One is a modest increase in the relocation of people from their homelands to other places, combined with a shift in the nature of that movement from North–South, North–North and South–South in the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, to South–North in the contemporary period (de Hass 2007: 822). Of the 191 million migrants across the world in 2005, Europe hosted 34 per cent, Asia 28 per cent, and North America 23 per cent (United Nations n.d.). Most of this movement has consisted of ‘economic migration’ in response to demand from employers seeking to keep down wages in the core of the world system (Glyn 2006: 102). The enforced movement of refugees and modern-day slaves has also played a part. We have already discussed some implications of these new diasporas for migrating music. Here we simply note a supervening tension in the neo-liberal ‘fix’: on the one hand, encouragement of the free passage of workers to the North so as to provide cheap labour; on the other, a pandering to racism among settled populations. These tensions contribute to the restless renegotiation of identity and difference at stake in the complex we call migrating music, and which make that phenomenon a profoundly ambivalent one.

The other way in which the advent of neo-liberalism has impacted upon migrating music is through the rise of the cultural industries and new communication technologies which have enabled the mediation of musics across the world – with or without the people who first made and used them. Having said this, we do not subscribe to a strong version of globalization theory that supposes that the advent of global cultural networks has been sudden and recent (such as in Held et al. 1999, or Tomlinson 1999). This is simply not the case. For instance, African-American musicians were performing in Europe to large audiences in concert and music halls during the nineteenth century (Pickering 1990), while the tango spread via recordings and films from its native Argentina to become a global phenomenon in the 1920s and 1930s (Gronow and Saunio 1998: 75–8). And of course European art music has assimilated, and then remitted, both court and people’s music from around the world since at least the seventeenth century (Taylor 2007: 15–110). If the material means for these developments have been augmented recently, what is at stake here is actually a steepening of the curve in a much longer upward trend in the carrying capacity of mass media – from printed sheet music to the multimedia platform of the Internet today. Contemporary forms of mediation give music increased potential to migrate more quickly, and to arrive in more places simultaneously, in very similar forms, compared to previous centuries.

What has this meant for the movement of music? First and most obviously, mediated music has become nearly ubiquitous (albeit on a more limited scale in developing countries) and with it genres of popular music honed in the core of the world system such as Tin Pan Alley standards, jazz, rock, rap and soul. Often these are predominantly, or strongly influenced by, African-African forms. Indeed it might be said that African-American music, made by the descendants of slaves transported in the Middle Passage, has become a kind of ‘primary’ migrating music which has then been rediffused to the rest of the world. We have already seen how the hybrid potentialities of African diasporic music contributed to this development. However behind this movement, and indeed behind the global spread of Western music in all its forms, has been an economic mechanism: massive economies of scale and the affluence of domestic markets. These factors enable the recovery of costs at home followed by cheap exports around the world of music which has already been ‘market-tested’ in the core, especially in the USA (see Marvasti 1994).

Other channels of musical migration and alternative networks of circulation also exist, however. Musical mediation has enabled rarer instances of South–South movement, most notably perhaps the adoption of rumba rhythms (rumba was itself a strongly African form) by central African musicians through the distribution of recordings made in Latin America (Stewart 2003). It has furthermore facilitated the flow of musics from South to North. The tango has been mentioned, but other significant examples include Brazilian bossa nova (see Keightley in this volume) and Jamaican reggae, which also has a strong South–South dimension (Toynbee 2007). Most recently there has been the phenomenon of ‘world music’: mainly vernacular forms from the global South (or its diasporic populations) which are then repackaged on CD for a small middle-class niche market in the North (Stokes 2004). Finally, the emergence of new ‘regional blocs’ needs to be acknowledged. As Dave Laing (1997) suggests, Canto- and Mando-Pop in East Asia, Spanish language pop in the Americas, and pan-European repertoire, especially dance music, now constitute distinct genre-markets.

Today, then, music is being produced and disseminated across the world in complex ways, with flows reflecting the drive to accumulate of the cultural industries, and producing asymmetries and inequalities. Yet there are counter-tendencies too, in the form of bottom-up developments. Just one example: in North India a lively ‘cassette culture’ emerged after the arrival of this cheap recording technology in the mid-1970s (Manuel 1993). Peter Manuel suggests that it enabled a new kind of democratic interactivity, and closer connections between music-makers and users, as well as posing a challenge to the corporate film music of ‘Bollywood’. Since Manuel did his research there has been a shift to digital media, and now Bollywood music itself is distributed on cheap ‘pirate’ recordings (explored in Beaster-Jones 2008). In the UK ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Migrating music
• PART 1 Migrants
• PART 2 Translations
• PART 3 Media
• PART 4 Cities
• Index