Creativity, globalization, and music: Rethinking innovation through colonial encounter and world music

Creativity, Globalization, and Music

The poststructuralist critique of the author and the romantic myth of genius has significantly constrained scholarly discourse on creativity in recent decades—particularly within academic circles and especially among social scientists. Outside the academy, however, high regard for creativity and the so-called creative industries has persisted in struggling Western economies. Some form of critical response is therefore necessary. Here I consider the issue through the lenses of globalization and postcolonial theory.

The concept of creativity carries a complicated history. It is fundamentally a product of the Enlightenment, yet it draws on older classical ideas of poesis and mimesis, later intertwined with monotheistic theologies. In many such traditions, only God is considered capable of creating; humans merely imitate. At times these creative abilities were regarded with suspicion—the worry being that the artist might assume powers disruptive to orderly social life, or that vulnerable souls might be confused and led astray. At other times, however, creative powers were prized for their ability to produce beauty and guide people toward spiritual wisdom. In the neo-Aristotelian traditions that entered Christian, Jewish, and Islamic thought during the early Middle Ages, one finds sophisticated reflection on how the artist, musician, or poet generates effects on the listener, with what tools, and in what relation to existing models. There is also substantial thinking about how these creative capacities must be schooled, trained, and disciplined.

Doubt about the very notion of creativity is therefore not new. Contemporary theoretical unease can be seen as an extension of older concerns. Unsurprisingly, the topic has largely disappeared from the musicological and ethnomusicological research agenda in recent decades. But some music scholars have begun to respond. Three positions, in particular, provide a starting point for the present essay.

Georgina Born explores the possibilities that new technologies afford for understanding creativity as a collective practice distributed across time and space—a form of “relayed” creativity. In this she sees potential for a new kind of cultural politics. Steven Feld examines how the global circulation of sounds detached from their origins has sparked fresh mimetic practices—especially the appropriation of so-called Pygmy sounds by a range of contemporary musicians. Feld is far less optimistic about this kind of creativity: despite utopian claims, new digital technologies and regimes of circulation have deepened Western fantasies and exploitation. More neutrally, Jason Toynbee, drawing on Bourdieu, locates creativity within a sociology of field and habitus. The field defines a more-or-less socially accepted space of artistic possibilities; habitus impels certain individuals or groups toward particular forms of expression shaped by their social formation. For Toynbee, creativity emerges at historical moments and under social arrangements where the fit between field and habitus is unusually loose.

With these writers’ work in mind, I approach creativity as a social practice deeply dependent on a society’s technological and political arrangements. I share their interest in creative practices that effect broader kinds of change—changes that (might) increase social actors’ sense of connection, agency, and possibility. Musically speaking, as these writers all suggest, such creative practices can be diverse. In some situations they may involve the transgression of past models; in others, their artful preservation. They may speed up or slow down depending on changing relations in and around the medium of transmission: oral, written, or digital. The people involved will assign very different values to them. I also share these writers’ recognition that creativity sits in a complex—indeed, peculiarly intense—field of social values.

The kinds of transmission practices we label “creative” in these terms will therefore be many and varied, not simply of one kind. The term “creative” may thus be somewhat loose in critical terms. But as these writers argue, it usefully sharpens certain questions. Are some historical moments, or particular locations in social space, or specific technological transformations inherently “creative”? How—and by whom—is creativity recognized, validated, and rewarded? Whose creative labor is obscured, appropriated, or exploited? What kinds of struggle take place over these recognitions, and for what political stakes? All of these questions are thrown into especially sharp relief when considered in the context of global cultural relations. These relations, of course, have a long history. I will examine two moments that are particularly instructive. The first I call “early colonial encounter”; the second I call “World Music.”

Early Colonial Encounter

Globalization is broadly associated with the increasingly connected circulation of people, technologies, commodities, and capital. It is thus intimately tied to colonialism. Arguably, the Spanish imperial project was the first to connect things globally, with the conquest of Manila in 1570. One can begin speaking of musical globalization at this early date, as Irving suggests in a study of “colonial counterpoint” in the Philippines.

Observing the speed with which indigenous populations turned toward church counterpoint—and in fact became noted for their musical skill far beyond the Philippines—Irving notes that pre-colonial indigenous practice already involved multipart singing and devotion to female deities. In other words, many were ready to participate in their colonial transformations, musically speaking at least. Local elites, among whom there was much intermarriage, came to see themselves as mixed and to attribute value to their “mixed” cultural practices (mestizaje). They took particular pride in their church music. The Manila church thus led in developing a variety of new Marian repertories, many of which were exported via Mexico to Europe.

A lively tradition of inquiry about music in what we would now call “cross-cultural” encounter developed. Near the end of the seventeenth century, Charles Perrault speculated about the connections between music heard in the Ottoman and Persian courts and the music of the ancient biblical and Greek world, known through scholarship. His writing took the form of an imagined debate among three characters: the Abbot, representing the church; the President, representing academia; and the Chevalier, representing nobility. Perrault published the various volumes of his Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes between 1688 and 1692. One later volume, published in 1697, discusses music along with astronomy, geography, navigation, war, philosophy, and medicine.

It is worth examining this conversation in some detail. Perrault imagines his characters strolling around the gardens of Versailles while waiting for the king to return from a trip. In this particular conversation, the Abbot takes the lead. He starts with a provocative observation: we think we know music, but actually know very little about music as it is understood by most of the world. “The music of the Ancients is still today the music of all the earth, except for one part of Europe…”—that is, our own. The Abbot has heard stories about this “ancient” music, encountered at events and soirees in the French embassy in Constantinople, and they have set him wondering. When the French played their favorite opera overtures, “the Turks could not stand it, considering the mixture of parts, to which they were not accustomed (i.e., polyphony), to be a chaotic racket.” Musical values, he seems to think, may be relative rather than absolute. His companions appear momentarily dumbstruck.

The Abbot presses on. Like the Ancients, the Orientals have cultivated only monophony. As a result, they have developed a level of sensitivity to tuning and temperament that the West has lost. Finally the President manages to splutter a response. The Germans, he observes, have invented keyboards in which the “irregularities” of current tunings could be remedied by adding extra keys to distinguish a D♯ from an E♭, and so forth. Surely this is just a technical matter? But the Abbot has his answer ready: in important respects, “their” musicians must be regarded as more skillful than ours. When French violinists played favorite tunes, the “Persian” musician at court could play them back instantly. (Persians from various parts of what is now Central Asia represented the dominant musical style in the Ottoman court during this period.) When challenged in return, the French violinist could manage “no more than four notes” of the tune the Persian musician played.

The Abbot, in a tone reminiscent of Voltaire, playfully provokes his companions with suggestions that, from a certain angle, “we” might be the ones lacking civilization, not “they.” In passing, he acknowledges areas where Western musicians enjoy superiority—technology, music literacy, multipart polyphony—but he does so with an equivocation calculated to needle his colleagues. Eventually the Chevalier attempts to steer the conversation toward less contentious ground. Hadn’t Petis de la Croix, sent by the King to study this music, learned it tolerably well? The Abbot is suddenly struck by another flight of fancy: having learned the music, “it would be nice to mix some bits of it into the Fêtes and Divertissements that His Majesty gave at his Court; to do a scene, for example, where the singers, dressed as Turks and playing the same instruments that are played in Constantinople, would sing the same songs and dance the same dances as are sung and danced before the Grand Seigneur, and another scene where the musicians would sing the same songs that are sung before the Sophi of Persia or the Great Moghul.” The President is intrigued, musing that it would be like being “transported in a single moment to all the different parts of the world.”

Several points in this fascinating conversation merit attention. The scene is fictional, but it replicates patterns known from other sources about musical diplomacy. First, it depicts exchange: the musicians play their own music, then swap, and see how they fare. Mutual curiosity as well as competition are at play. A restless variety of musical transformations are set in motion by these encounters, lasting centuries. Instruments circulate—violins, keyboards, triangles, bass drums, cymbals—their novelty quickly fading. The Ottomans begin to experiment with notation, adopt Western instruments, standardize their repertories, and organize performance in larger, coordinated ensembles. They also start asking themselves questions about the powers of rationality and order that these practices seem to contain or imply. Europeans, for their part, begin to experiment with intonation and temperament, seeking to recover the mysteriously lost affective power of the music of the Ancients. Something, they begin to suspect, might be gained by studying this music and taking it seriously.

The encounter triggers independent transformations of musical practice on both sides—what one might loosely call creative processes. Some result from the circulation of new technologies and ways of doing things (instruments, notation). Others, such as the search for a composition style that conveys the emotional power of words, may have been underway independently but now receive a boost, as a rival is deemed possibly to hold an advantage. The encounter also gives rise to practices that seek to combine these different musics, to think about them relationally, and to bring them to bear on one another. Much later, Arthur Koestler would describe this in terms of “bisociation”: creativity emerging at the intersection and interaction of two frames of reference.

So this was a creative moment, rich in implication for both the modern West and the post-Ottoman world. But it was also entangled with a global struggle for power. Many traces of this appear in the conversation. The Abbot wants costumed French musicians to perform Ottoman music for the King, whose power might somehow be amplified by this act of mimesis. The capacity to represent in this way—to grasp the essences, structures, and plans of things and impose them on others—became vitally important to Europeans in their colonies. The President, meanwhile, immediately daydreams about musical teleportation, about music’s ability to let us be everywhere at once. These may be understood as emergent fantasies of power at the dawn of European colonialism. They are also fantasies of value—one kind or another—extracted from the Other and accumulated by the Self. Certain historical conditions for thinking about creativity globally were thus established, and one could argue they still prevail today.

World Music

Many initially believed that globalization had diminished the total sum of creativity in the world. Alan Lomax, for instance, spoke of the cultural “grey out” of modernity. American films, popular music, soft drinks, and fast food would conquer the planet. Cultural traditions would wither, leaving creative options that amounted to copying of one kind or another. Lomax’s cantometrics project was conceived—pessimistically—against this backdrop.

His views were widely shared. Somewhat later, the dominance of a handful of large media companies—Time-Warner, Thorn-EMI, Bertelsmann, Sony, PolyGram, and Matsushita, the six majors—generated extensive discussion under the rubric of the “cultural imperialism hypothesis.” In the mid-1990s, the International Federation for Phonographic Industries estimated that the majors controlled roughly 80-90 percent of legal recorded-music sales worldwide. Many believed they homogenized global tastes and commodified culture in ways that broadly facilitated American hegemony.

Enthusiasm for “World Music” in the industrial heartlands of Western Europe and North America during the 1980s and 1990s suggested otherwise. The term’s origins and history remain matters of debate. Concert promoters, journalists, musicians, and independent record company owners who coined the term in the United Kingdom intended to create “a handle for something that was already there, but needed to be identified.” In the view of those responsible, it was a benign marketing device meant to group together a “bunch of people who were already friends, already working on things that they loved and supported.”

These individuals recognized two things. First, the postcolonial world, far from greying out or remaining trapped in tradition, had all along been the scene of vibrant musical creativity. Second, independent record producers in the West were already playing an active part in its diffusion and transformation. Following the punk-rock explosion of the 1970s, independents had become highly responsive to new confluences of youth, Black, and migrant culture in European and American cities. World music styles such as rai—a North African migrant music—were shaped and nurtured by independent labels like the French company Barclay.

The case of rai is instructive. PolyGram bought Barclay in 1978 and reaped the benefits when a rai album, Khaled’s Didi of 1992, became an unexpected hit, selling in significant numbers across Europe. Khaled’s success substantially affected rai production in North Africa, accelerating transformations already underway. A genre formerly dominated by women, like Cheikha Remitti, gradually became male-dominated. Sounds previously engineered and marketed for a North African audience were fused with a variety of transatlantic Black styles and oriented toward a broad European and American audience. PolyGram certainly profited, but none of this would have happened without Barclay’s cultivation of various underground and migrant markets in France. In part, then, the World Music phenomenon demonstrated that the “cultural imperialism” hypothesis had predicted matters quite wrongly—at least as far as media systems were concerned. Globally, the interaction of large and small, official and unofficial media systems had had a productive, creative effect, transforming musics and markets in highly unpredictable ways.

World Music thus involved recognizing an “actually existing” globalization that had relatively little to do with American cultural hegemony or the dominance of the six majors. One might think of it as a kind of “globalization from below.” It not only forged creative links between the industrial West and the “global South,” but also creative links within the global South. Musically speaking, these conversations flourished over significant periods across the African diaspora—what Paul Gilroy calls the “Black Atlantic”—linked by shared instruments, dance practices, and performance techniques. Religious movements and postcolonial solidarities intensified these conversations and spread them still further in the twentieth century. The West established the conditions of possibility for these musical interactions through slavery and colonialism, but it has not necessarily been the dominant voice.

The distribution of creativity

Throughout the twentieth century and into our own era, non-Western music has consistently revitalized creativity within Western art music. Since early European expansion, the non-West supplied exotica—a spur to critical thought and particular modes of experimentation. During the colonial period, it began to justify more wide-ranging and systematic experiments with scale, tonality, and rhythm. Twentieth-century media revolutions shifted these energies toward popular music, from tango to rap and hip-hop.

Ethnomusicology from its beginnings opposed such exoticism, mainly on grounds of misrepresentation. An ethical critique of credited and owned creativity emerged only later. Copyright laws covering non-Western music have always been easy to evade. Concert audiences and CD buyers seldom expect attribution when Javanese gamelan, Arab samai forms, Breton bagpiping, or West African drumming appear in Western art or popular works. Appropriated “non-Western” creativity is effectively labeled “traditional”—detached from individual agency and rights, and therefore not really “creativity” at all. Western creativity, by contrast, is enshrined in copyright law and treated as a different, more important order. Figures like Brian Eno, Enigma, Peter Gabriel, David Byrne, and Paul Simon faced criticism not primarily for misrepresentation but for exploitation (for recent examples see Feld 2000; Feld and Kirkegaard 2010).

This worldview splits the globe in two: a “traditional” non-West and a “creative” West. A closely related picture simply flips that: a West that can only imitate, and a non-West that is the site of primal, powerful creativity. The latter attributes healing properties to a world wounded by industrial capitalism. Consider Peter Gabriel’s description of his attraction to African music in Philip Sweeney’s early World Music handbook:

“It was the choir I was drawn to initially – by Ladysmith Black Mambazo and others with their close kinship to Gospel and their blend of spirituality and sensuality at the same time… the spirituality of South African music appealed especially…. One of the most striking things about West African percussion is the fluidity of the rhythms. This is partly due to the actual equipment used. The little drumsticks that Senegalese drummers like Doudou N’Diaye use are often freshly cut from the tree, so they’re much more flexible than western drumsticks. They’re also much shorter. The result is a more liquid tone, somewhere between a hand and a western drumstick in sound.” (Sweeney 1991: 2)

Here African music is understood to operate in a space distinct from the industrial West and its rigid divisions between spirituality and sensuality, body and technology, nature and culture. Its qualities are “fluidity,” “flexibility,” and “liquidity.” The West offers an alternative: a drumstick or a hand. Africa provides the space in between.

The healing narrative is easy to perceive. Gabriel echoes long traditions that view Africa and the African Diaspora as the creative wellspring of Western popular music—a source white Europeans consider “their own” only through appropriation or theft.

Afro- or Black-centric theft narratives are ubiquitous in Western pop music discourse, whether concerning Elvis, the Rolling Stones, or Eminem. On one hand they involve sincere recognition of musical exploitation on a global scale—one type among many. On the other they have done nothing to stop people exploiting African music on one pretext or another. Criticisms of how other people have exploited African music typically intend to carve out an ethical space for more equitable appropriations. As Feld notes in a damning critique (Feld 2000), these are usually entirely self-deceiving. Yet the problem here is how such narratives construct a world split in two, in which the West either celebrates its own creativity or tries to justify its appropriation of others’ creativity.

Hybridity, migrancy, and fusion: a critical perspective

World Music also sustains a different—though complementary—idea of global creativity: one linked to hybridity, migrancy, and cultural “fusion.”

We might begin with Philip Sweeney. In an early guide, he suggests that World Music could be understood:

as a sort of new mutated “First World” genre, a conscious fusion of traditional “Third World” forms with elements of Anglo-American rock and jazz. “I play world music,” Salif Keita told me last year, “not African music.” The new crossover/fusion area of music-making is currently booming, typified by the Brussels-based Belgian-Zairean female quintet Zap Mama, whose a capella arrangements mixing European, Central African pygmy, Zulu and Arab melodies, among other things, have made them one of the hottest attractions at this summer’s European festivals (Sweeney 1992).

These terms, which simultaneously suggest and conceal struggles, accommodations, and distinctions, require scrutiny. Salif Keita, for instance, had followed several West African musicians to Paris, notably Manu Dibango. In his heartfelt memoir, Dibango describes the difficulty of life as an African musician in Paris in the 1950s, and later in America. He struggled with conflicting expectations and demands on his identity. In France he was expected to behave musically as a conduit for jazz, that is, black American culture. In America, he was expected to behave musically as an African. Back in Cameroon, his European and American experience took front stage. “I am a divided man,” he notes poignantly at the start of his autobiography (1994: 2). Eventually he regarded Americans’ and Europeans’ interpretations of his Africanness with amused detachment and as a creative resource. Ad hoc musical experiments in one space might unexpectedly pay off in another, with different musicians and audiences; when brought back to the original site, an entirely new genre could emerge. Such, indeed, is the story he tells of “Soul Makossa,” his major hit.

Here hybridity is tied to migration. Migrancy from the post-colonial world has been met with opposition and sometimes violence in former colonial capitals. But attitudes across Europe and North America are complex. Sociological and anthropological interest in “hyphenated identities”—Franco-Maghrebi, “Newyorican,” Irish-American, British-Asian, and so on—rejected the earlier social science view of migrant culture as problematic, as an inability to be fully one thing or another. Instead, such hyphenated identities came to be understood in terms of empowerment, agency, and creativity.

Managers of metropolitan areas eager to market themselves as “global cities” subsequently made much of this (see Sassen 2001). In such cities, “ethnic neighborhoods” signified diversity, energy, and creativity—and therefore an intelligent workforce, lively consumers, and a great place for business. For a variety of reasons, hybridity has thus come to be equated with creativity by many.

When privileging migrancy as a special site of creativity, romanticization is a danger that demands caution. Anna Tsing trenchantly notes the need to distinguish cosmopolitans from migrants. Cosmopolitans fashion their own worlds; migrants must fit into worlds made by other people (Tsing 2002). Hybrid cultural practices—Sweeney’s “crossover/fusion”—involve power relations that always require careful consideration. If there is any doubt, Manu Dibango’s autobiography speaks forcefully about the very real struggles faced by countless African migrants in Europe and America today, even talented musicians.

Zap Mama, the well-known “Brussels-based Belgian-Zairean female quintet” led by Marie Daulne, is Sweeney’s second example of crossover, fusion, and migrancy. This case also merits closer exploration. Daulne was born in Zaire to a Belgian father and Zairean mother, and grew up in Belgium. After Zap Mama’s initial success, she returned to Congo to learn traditional Central African vocal techniques. After extensive travel and a stay in New York, she returned to Belgium. Her story is reminiscent of Manu Dibango’s, though her struggles with identity led elsewhere. Dibango eventually came to understand his Africanness as a position or stance within a complex field of musical representations. Daulne, by contrast, seems to have been driven by a more active fantasy of Africanness in music, one significantly shaped by ethnographic recordings. The track “Babenzélé,” for instance, on Adventures in Afropea (1993), closely mimics the densely layered interlocking of voices, whistles, and hand clapping found on Simha Arom’s 1966 ethnographic recording made among the Babenzélé in the Central African Republic. Despite its studied fidelity to the Arom recording, the Zap Mama version includes subtly added elements. The women’s voices provide a sparse harmonic underpinning—an oscillation of tonic and dominant seventh chords throughout. Such combinations of European a capella singing with African vocal technique lead Sweeney to characterize their music as “hybrid.”

Musically, the term “hybridity” is quite problematic. It might point—as Sweeney’s terms suggest—to a consciousness of fusion on the part of the musicians involved. But there is always more to say, beyond what various social actors are conscious of, about the historical circulation of musical practices. “Anglo-American pop,” viewed in the broadest historical frame, is densely packed with African, Latin, and Old World European folk elements. “African” musical practices come from similarly diverse origins, incorporating European elements going back to the earliest days of slavery, colonialism, and missionary work. Every element of a hybridized style is itself a hybrid—a bricolage of earlier encounters, assimilations, and blends.

At a given moment, musicians such as Salif Keita or Marie Daulne may conceptualize their art and creativity in terms of “mixing.” But this may not be the most helpful guide for understanding the broader conditions that allow these elements to “mix” in the first place, or how they will continue to circulate.

World Music discourse is linked to another ideological redistribution of creativity—this time onto migrants in the “global cities” of the West. It has been imagined in terms of hybridity, a term that, I suggest, does not withstand much critical interrogation. And it has been projected onto migrants and migrant neighborhoods in ways that are compensatory and implicated in marketing “global cities.” Once again, globalization has intensified myths surrounding creativity. How, then, do we think our way through them? I will make some tentative suggestions in the conclusion.

Conclusion: towards “creativity” in global perspective

“Globalization” is the term habitually given to the late-twentieth-century transformations in the circulation of capital, labor, and technology, or, more specifically, American hegemony. But, as we know, it has a far longer history, and it is not purely Western. Neither, as we also know, is it simply a history of power. It is also a history of resistances and accommodations, identifications and senses of difference, tastes and pleasures, circulating on ever-increasing scales.

“Creativity” is the term habitually given to acts by individuals within cultural transmission. Something is added, through powers shrouded in mystique, that transforms materials and breaks forms and traditions. Such, at least, is the romantic myth. But creativity can also be collective (distributed across social space) and relayed (distributed across time). It can involve preserving materials, forms, and traditions just as much as transforming them. As we have seen, it is a value attached to certain kinds of cultural transmission, usually positive, and thus a deeply ideological category.

These critical observations might initially suggest there is nothing much to say about “creativity in global perspective.” But some observations are certainly possible. First, whether as authenticity (ideally African) or hybridity (ideally migrant), fantasies and anxieties about authentic creativity persist and have cultural consequences. They have motivated not only plunder and exploitation, but also—from the earliest colonial contact—wonder and play.

They have forced recognitions of the limits and pretensions of Western hegemony (that is, “universalism”). They have licensed critical thinking and consequential experimentation. They have involved imaginative efforts to bring things deemed separate together, whether to enjoy the play of difference or to explore possibilities for commonalities. All of this can be said of World Music today and of its scholarly twin, ethnomusicology.

Ethnomusicology, the study of the world’s music, has an antagonistic and critical relationship with World Music, but this relationship has actually been extremely productive. David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) made extensive use of ethnographic and global popular music recordings; it pushed the technological envelope regarding analog sampling in ways that anticipated and significantly paved the way for digital sampling. The minimalism of Steve Reich or Philip Glass is hard to imagine without taking into account how widespread West African drumming ensembles and Javanese gamelans were in North American ethnomusicology programs during the same period. In the West, World Music, art music experimentalism, and academic ethnomusicology—respectively commerce, creativity, and critique in relation to world musics—have been mutually implicated for much of the late twentieth century and remain so today. This mutual implication has not simply been a matter of Western hegemony; it has often been critical, self-searching, and productive in unanticipated ways.

Second, globalization has been about increasing scales of circulation and connection. This is not to imply equality: many are, of course, left out. Portable sound recording and reproduction technologies, from the cassette to the laptop, made sound objects (elements of style, timbre, musical technique) portable in unique ways that have tended to fly under systems of cultural control and authority. Highly mobile migrant populations have thus had ways to stay in touch physically and musically with home, while enabling imaginative connections with other migrant communities—communities that may have little in common other than skin color or religion.

Conjunctions of technological change, labor migration, and urbanization produced the twentieth century’s most enduring popular musical practices: tango, jazz, salsa, rai, rap, and hip-hop, the list goes on. Metropolitan markets (most recently “World Music”) for some of these genres often became a significant factor in their production and stylistic development. Creativity can usefully be understood in terms of new global spaces opened up for musical communication and conversation through uneven, though ever-widening, scales in the circulation of people, technologies and ideas.

Today that would mean exploring “creativity” in relation to digital technologies, ideologies that forge global connections among the powerless (e.g., “Blackness”), markets in exotica (e.g., “World Music”), and increasingly global patterns of movement and settlement (e.g., “global cities” and migrancy). It would involve, as I have argued throughout, thinking about creativity in more socially, historically, and ethnographically grounded ways, in broader contexts of cultural transmission. And, as I have also argued, it would involve not just globalization “from above” but also “from below”—that is, in terms of multiple projects of world-imagining in multiple locales, not only those of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’ dominant powers.

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NOTES

1. Plato banned the poet from the polis. My perspective broadly follows Rancière’s analysis of “the mimetic regime”, which I take to have been remarkably persistent, though superseded in his view by representative and later aesthetic regimes.

2. I also share Jacques Rancière’s recognition that the “redistribution of the senses” in the aesthetic domain connects to other forms of (political) redistribution (Rancière 2004). This link was especially intense in post-1800 European culture, and rethinking the category of “the aesthetic” with this in mind proves very useful — but it is certainly not confined to Enlightenment European high culture.

3. This has been most systematically explored in the English-language literature by Ian Woodfield; see, for instance, Woodfield 1995.

4. Koestler’s concept of bisociation, alongside recent cognitive psychology, informed Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner; this in turn influenced musicologist Laurence Zbikowski. Although his work does not directly address musical creativity, it has important implications here. In short, cross-domain mapping may represent one way currents of innovation are generated and made meaningful. See Zbikowski 2002.

5. For an early, and usefully critical, discussion, see Laing 1986.

6. In the UK, many consider a 1987 meeting in the Empress of Russia, a pub in Islington, London, involving concert promoters, journalists, musicians and independent record label owners, as central. Cottrell 2010 gives a recent account.

7. I primarily draw on Virolle-Suibes 1995 and Gross, McMurray and Swedenburg 2003.

8. Key studies here include Turino 2000, Erlmann 1999, Meintjes 2003, and White 2008.

9. Gabriel’s terminology aligns with characterizations of capital and labour under globalization. “Creativity” is currently prized by governments pursuing austerity in Europe, and strongly in these terms. Their policies on funding the arts and humanities — where one might learn both “flexibility” and critical understanding — are, needless to say, full of contradictions.

10. I draw here on critiques of World Music by Simon Frith (2000) and Timothy Taylor (1997).

11. I have in mind Michael Taussig’s analysis of colonial mimesis (Taussig 1993). Copying reverberated on both sides of some of the most violent colonial encounters, generating complex dynamics. Early Latin American colonists noted mimetic powers in native populations and themselves mimicked them. This process echoed on each side of the colonial divide as both groups sought to grasp each other’s mysterious powers. Taussig’s treatment of the unruly creative energies triggered by colonial mimesis is highly relevant. See also Stokes 2004, which in its conclusion explores how an analysis of play might inform discussions of musical globalization.

12. For instance, Jocelyne Guilbault (1993) notes a culture of dependency on French markets in her study of zouk in the Antilles.

ABSTRACTS

Globalization theory has — albeit implicitly — been greatly concerned with whether globalization enhances or inhibits cultural creativity. Debates about “World Music” reveal the same concern. These debates, here grouped under three broad headings — “cultural imperialism”, “hybridity” and “authenticity” — and briefly addressing West and North African case studies, display a persistent anxiety about what counts as “true creativity” as opposed to “imitation”, “translation”, “cultural greyout” or “bureaucratization”. Plainly, these categories for describing cultural transmission are ideologically laden and enshrine Western aesthetic values. Yet they come under pressure from many new cultural practices associated with globalization. The task of much “World Music” discourse, I argue, is to exert counter-pressure, preserving essential features of Western aesthetic ideology. My final case study — a brief discussion of Perrault's Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes — reminds us that what I describe as “World Music discourse” has a long history.

Globalization theory has — implicitly — been deeply concerned with whether globalization enhances or inhibits cultural creativity. The World Music debates share this concern. Grouped here under three headings — “cultural imperialism”, “hybridity” and “authenticity”, with case studies from West and North Africa — these debates reveal persistent anxiety about what qualifies as “true creativity” versus “imitation”, “translation”, “cultural greyout” or “bureaucratization”. These categories for describing cultural transmission are, evidently, ideologically charged and grounded in Western aesthetic values. However, many new cultural practices associated with globalization put them under pressure. I argue that World Music discourse primarily applies counter-pressure, maintaining certain key outlines of Western aesthetic ideology. My final case study — a brief discussion of Charles Perrault's Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes — shows that this discourse has a long history.