Music on the move, as object, as commodity

TIMOTHY D. TAYLOR

This chapter treats the production, distribution, and consumption of musics around the world. As a result of the rise of digital and other technologies in the last few decades, the distribution and consumption of music has become ubiquitous, leading to a condition that composer R.

Music for most of human history was not recorded in any fashion. Even today, recordings of music as sound or in notation are more the exception than the norm. The history of the objectification and later commodification of music that has led to ideologies of the exchangeability and appropriability of music in the West must begin with its earliest form of objectification in the form of notation. In the European Middle Ages, the same texts were being sung differently in different churches in different locations since their music was transmitted orally, stored in people's memories. Notation was introduced at the behest of Charlemagne in the eighth century as a means of standardizing musical treatments of the liturgy from one church to the next, and from one generation to the next. Notation began as a simple aide memoire. Music would be copied by hand, as were religious texts, though composers came to learn that notation afforded them the opportunity to test its limits, and their creativity, so that by the fourteenth century, musical works by Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-77) and others had become ingeniously constructed and quite intricate.

The next major shift in the objectification of music emerged with the rise of music printing at the end of the fifteenth century. Printing with moveable type was as much a revolution in music publishing as in the printing of texts and drawings, facilitating the further movement of music around the European continent, permitting composers a broader audience outside of the church, and objectifying music in a new way.

Capitalism

While these developments in the history of music were crucial, in some ways they were less important than those that followed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when musicians' livelihoods changed dramatically. There were several intertwined developments that bear directly on the conceptions of music that are still common today, and I will consider them separately here.

Copyright

First, while composers and performers had long worked for the church or for a member of the nobility in what is known as the patronage system, with the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of a capitalist middle class in the late eighteenth century, composers increasingly were subject to the whims of the market, and had to think increasingly in entrepreneurial terms. They were aided in this by a number of cultural and legal shifts, the first of which was the introduction of copyright in the late eighteenth century, which allowed com­posers or their publishers ownership of their works, which was a right that had previously been the monarch's to give. With the entry of musical works into the capitalist marketplace, composers increasingly saw themselves as artists, even geniuses (a concept that would arise later, in the nineteenth century). These were - and remain - powerful ideologies by which composers attempt to differentiate themselves from others in a capitalist market of works.

Aesthetics

Another important shift was the rise of aesthetics, or the notion of “art for art's sake,” an idea that has a rather curious history. I have written at greater length elsewhere of the crisis of use-value of artworks with the decline of the patronage system.^[366] In the work of almost every important classical philosopher, music - in particular, instrumental music - poses a unique problem. Opera and other musical genres with words, or accompanied by dance, represent something - such music tells a story, paints a picture with sound. Instrumental music, however, does not. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in his Dictionnaire de Musique (1767) under the entry for “sonata” that

in order to know what all these jumbles of sonatas mean, one would have to be like a crude painter who must write above his figures; this is a tree, this is a man, this is a horse. I shall never forget the flash of wit of the famous Fontenelle, who, finding himself overburdened with these interminable Symphonies, cried out in fit of impatience: sonata, what do you want of me?^[367]

Something as apparently useless - devoid of use-value - as instrumental music had to be dealt with in this new market of music, and it was Adam Smith who first proposed the idea that instrumental music does not need to signify anything at all - it can simply signify itself. In an essay published in 1795, Smith writes,

That music seldom means to tell any particular story, or to imitate any particular event, or in general to suggest any particular object, distinct from that combination of sounds of which itself is composed. Its meaning, there­fore, may be said to be complete in itself, and to require no interpreters to explain it. What is called the subject of such Music is merely... a certain leading combination of notes, to which it frequently returns, and to which all its digressions and variations bear a certain affinity.^[368]

He continues, after comparing music to painting, by writing that the melody and harmony of music do not “suggest” anything other than themselves, and, “in fact [they] signify and suggest nothing.”^[369]1 would be remiss not to mention Alexander Baumgarten's monumental eight-volume Aesthetica, published from 1750-8, which marks the first use of the term “aesthetics.”

The overall point is that with the entry of music into the capitalist market­place in the late eighteenth century, there was not only a crisis of use-value, particularly with respect to instrumental music, but also, the establishment of exchange-value, coupled with the rise of aesthetics.

Nationalisms/Colonialisms

European composers who actively appropriated or represented folk musics from their own regions in their music were common in the nineteenth century, whether Bedfich Smetana (1824-1884) or Antonin Dvorak (1841­1904) in Czechoslovakia, or representations of “gypsy” music by Franz Liszt (1811-1886), Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), and many others.

But, despite the liberation achieved by the rise of aesthetics, as well as the concepts of, genius, and masterpiece, Western musicians - and audiences - did not show much interest in musics from other places until the beginning of the late nineteenth / early twentieth centuries. In part this newfound interest was a result of both nationalist tendencies, as well as the experience of some European states, particularly France, slowly coming to grips with their colonialized Others voyaging to Paris and other European metropoles. Some of this interest in sounds from other places was a result of the widespread belief among composers that tonality, the do-re-mi musical language that had been dominant since the beginning of the seventeenth century, had been worn out, that innovation through the manipulation of pitches was no longer possible after the works of Richard Wagner (1813-83) and others, who were thought to have stretched tonality to the breaking point. New musical resources were needed, and they were found, by some composers at least, in non-Western musics, or in the musics of rural folk musicians.

By the end of the nineteenth century in France, musicians, and the French public in general, first came into contact with sounds from other places through attendance at international exhibitions beginning in the late nine­teenth century.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918), the first of the modernist French composers, visited the 1889 exposition, and wrote in 1913, using the romanticizing language of this era:

There were, and still are, despite the evils of civilization, some delightful native peoples for whom music is as natural as breathing. Their conserva­toire is the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind among the leaves and the thousand sounds of nature which they understand without consulting an arbitrary treatise. Their traditions reside in old songs, combined with dances, built up throughout the centuries. YetJavanese music is based on a type of counterpoint by comparison with which that of Palestrina is child's play. And if we listen without European prejudice to the charm of their percussion we must confess that our percussion is like primitive noises at a country fair.^[370]

Debussy employed or referred to Javanese music in several compositions.^[371]

Other composers in this period turned inward to their own cultures as a means of devising new musical languages, whether Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) cultivating a relationship to Russian folk music in such celebrated works as Le Sacre du printemps (1913), which makes use of many Russian folk songs^[372]; or the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok (1881-1945), who collected folk music from all over Eastern Europe, some of which found its way into many of his works. Bartok, like many composers of his time, believed that music needed to be renewed. For him, the solution was to seek inspiration from folk music of his region.^[373]

The interests of Stravinsky, Bartok, and others in non-Western musics, or musics “other” to their own music, were driven in part by the rising hegemony of finance capital in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centu­ries, which slowly helped to promote an ideology of the importance of exchange-value over use-value and, indeed, everything else.^{[374] [375]} Other musics were slowly reconceptualized not as “other,” but as sounds that could be incorporated into one's own music, just as, in the visual arts, Picasso and Georges Bracque began to appropriate everyday objects into their artworks.

New technologies of recording and reproduction

Bartok and others were aided in the collecting of folk songs by new technol­ogies such as the phonograph. This device, invented in the USA and Europe about the same time, the late 1870s, made possible recording and playback of sounds. While Thomas Edison, the inventor in the USA, famously did not conceive of recording music as an important use for the phonograph, instead viewing it as a more homely device that could record the last words of a dying family member, or a song that one could bring to a friend later to play for her amusement.^{[376] [377]}

Nonetheless, the player piano, phonograph, and, later, radio, and sound film all had a profound effect on people's relationships to music, for all of these devices not only continued the objectification and commodification of music that had begun with music printing - they objectified and commodi­fied music as sound.

To be sure, consumers in both Europe and the USA were slow to adopt these new technologies. Learning to conceive of musical sound as something that someone purchased instead of making it oneself was a slow and lengthy process that took decades, aided in part by the rise of a modern consumer culture that was buttressed by the new advertising industry in the late nineteenth century, which helped promote new sound reproduction tech­nologies such as the player piano, phonograph, and radio.1³

Even though many musicians and intellectuals initially opposed what they decried as “mechanical music,” these new technologies caught on.¹⁴ Recordings, and even player piano rolls, made available musics from other places that allowed composers to hear different sounds and employ them in their own music. With the advent of magnetic tape immediately after World War II, recorded music could be manipulated electronically, as it was in several well-known composers' works, such as Pierre Boulez (1925-) and Karlheinz Stockhausen's (1928-2007), whose Hymnen (1966-7) conglomerates national anthems from all over the world, and whose Telemusik (1966), he says, is an attempt to realize an “old and ever-recurrent dream: to go a step further towards writing, not ‘my' music, but a music of the whole world, of all lands and races.”¹⁵ Music was thus ever more divorced from its original makers, ever more an object, a commodity.

Production, distribution, and consumption of music in globalized neoliberal capitalism

With this section I arrive at the main focus of this chapter, a consideration of recent forms of the objectification and commodification of music facilitated in part by new digital technologies, which also enable the increasing con­sumption of musics from around the world. Capitalism has changed as well - also made possible in part by new digital technologies - so it is necessary to lay the groundwork for what follows.

Generally I am in agreement with those who have posited a new form of capitalism that emerged a few decades ago, though commentators do not always agree on what to call it, whether late capitalism, disorganized capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, or something else altogether, such as “globalization” or “information age” or “network society.” I have come somewhat reluctantly to prefer the term neoliberal capitalism, a form of capitalism that is being shaped by policies that have sought to enrich elite groups by aggressively utilizing the powers of the state, new technologies, and seeking global markets and labor. Thus, while I agree with those who describe today's capitalism as neoliberal, I find much of this work to be

mechanical “finger,” “play” the piano. Later player pianos incorporated the playing mechanism inside the piano itself.

14 Taylor, Katz, and Grajeda, Music, Sound, and Technology in America, collects some writings by these detractors.

15 Karl H. Worner, Stockhausen: Life and Work, ed. and trans. Bill Hopkins (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1973), p. 58. See also Karlheinz Stockhausen, “World Music,” trans. Bernard Radloff, Dalhousie Review 69 (1989), 318-326. economistic, failing to pay sufficient attention to the culture that neoliberal­ism is shaping, one that is increasingly globally interconnected.

While the international record industry distributed European and American music abroad almost from its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century, mainly along colonial pathways, musics from non­Western Elsewheres were not easily available in Western metropoles until fairly recently. There were, of course, ethnographic and other kinds of field recordings that one could hear, but commercial recordings from, say, India or Africa were not common until the last few decades. In part this was simply because many small, or even large, countries did not have recording industries.^[378] But once these countries increasingly became capitalist and increasingly developed a music industry, exports became more common.

Important precursors to what became known as world music was the rise of, first, ska, and later reggae in Jamaica, musics that gained worldwide popularity. Ska originated in the 1950s and developed both from other Caribbean musics such as calypso, but also African American popular musics. Reggae, which grew out of ska and rocksteady a decade or so later, produced the first non-US and non-European international music superstar, Bob Marley (1945-1981), whose belief that all black and brown people are brothers and sisters had an incalculable influence around the world. As an Australian radio DJ recalled, “Bob Marley played Adelaide in early 1979. The dust raised by that tour never really settled.”^[379] Australian aboriginal musicians, as did musicians around the world, began to make reggae and other popular musics themselves.

But Marley sang in English, and his music, owing as it did to African American sounds and styles, was not so different to listeners accustomed to American and European popular music that it couldn't find an international market. What was different in the 1980s and after was that more and more music from the West's Elsewheres was entering record shops. Retailers didn't know where to shelve it. The old “International” section that included German polkas and Irish drinking songs didn't seem to be the right place to shelve music from South Africa that sounded like Western popular music, though sung in languages nobody in the shops knew. So, a group of retailers and journalists and radio DJs gathered in London in 1987 and selected the term “world music” to describe these new sounds, which were mostly music

Music on the move, as object, as commodity influenced by British and American popular music but which were at the same time, new.^{[380] [381]} As the influential British DJ and author Charlie Gillett recounted,

We had a very simple, small ambition. It was all geared to record shops, that was the only thing we were thinking about. In America, King Sunny Ade (from Nigeria) was being filed under reggae. That was the only place shops could think of to put him. In Britain they didn't know where to put this music - I think Ade was just lost in the alphabet, next to Abba. In 1985 [sic] Paul Simon did Graceland and that burst everything wide open, because he created an interest in South African music. People were going into shops saying: “I want some of that stuff” and there wasn't anywhere for them to look.1⁹

“World music” gave many musicians from around the world a platform, even as the international music industry attempted to turn this vast collection of different musics into a “genre.” But the term also advertised the presence of new music from everywhere, and many composers and musicians saw them, as did musicians early in the twentieth century, as a way of revitalizing their music, whether their field was composition or songwriting.

Thanks to centuries of the objectification and commodification of music and the liberatory effects of the ideology of aesthetics, which had been extended to rock musicians in the realm of popular music (who are akin to composers in the classical world in the license they are permitted to realize their creativity), world music of all kinds was viewed as ripe for the picking. Or, rather, it was frequently viewed as a natural resource that was ready to be mined. Discourses about world music from the 1980s and 1990s are replete with Western musicians characterizing non-Western popular musics as nat­ural resources that were waiting to be discovered by the right explorer or curator.

Stewart Copeland, former drummer of the 1980s megaband The Police, issued a recording 1985 called The Rhythmatist that employed sounds from around Africa. The liner notes showed a photograph of Copeland all dressed in black, holding a huge, phallic, microphone, a new explorer in a neoliberal world. Copeland characterized the album, and its title, thus:

“ Rhythmalism" is the study of patterns that weave the fabric of life; with this speculation in mind a black clad figure is on his way across the so-called dark continent. He meets lions, warriors, pygmies and jungles before stumbling across the rock.^[382]

When confronted with the idea that perhaps he was simply appropriating other peoples' music, Copeland responded by ridiculing the idea that he was “mining” other people's music, and insisted that musicians around the world derived pleasure from knowing that farawary people enjoyed their music.^[383]

Paul Simon, for another example of the assumption of the naturalness of cultural production outside of Western metropoles, said, “Culture flows like water. It isn't something that can just be cut off.”^[384] Elsewhere, in response to a charges that he had appropriated black music as early rock ‘n' roll musicians had done, Simon retorted, “You think it's easy to make a hit out of [that]?,” as though Ladysmith Black Mambazo's and other South African musicians' music was raw material in need of refinement by a westerner with superior knowledge and technologies.^[385]

These kinds of attitudes remain quite common, as rock musicians, as well as composers of contemporary classical music, believe that anything goes in the feeding of their muse.

Paul Simon and Graceland (1986)

Indeed, it was Simon's Graceland album from 1986 that awakened many, even most, listeners to world music, and in particular, African popular musics. Simon, like many Western stars who work with musicians from other cultures, says that he had been listening to South African popular musics for some time before he began to learn about them and began to desire making an album with local musicians. This kind of claim of a longstanding relationship is common among Western stars, who presumably don't want to be seen as carpetbaggers; establishing a kind of long-term connoisseurship is part of this strategy, before these musicians can be seen as curators of non­Western musics, or even, collaborators.^[386]

Simon violated a United Nations boycott of trade with South Africa to make his recording, though he paid his musicians well. The album, while popular for its music, nonetheless was criticized by many for violated this boycott and Simon's perceived appropriation of South African popular musics.^{[387] [388]} At the same time, the musicians with whom Simon worked defended him, and their work on the album. They, like so many musicians around the world, had been seeking international recognition and working with an American superstar like Paul Simon was a way to achieve this. As Ray Phiri, a guitarist from the album, said,

We as South African musicians, we were using him more than he was using us, if ever there was any [appropriate] word like “using.” Because here we were, isolated from the world, and trying really hard to get involved in the international community. And it wasn't happening. And suddenly here was this guy who was known, and was writing beautiful words. And I thought maybe if we mix our rhythms with his thoughts we might get some kind of musical osmosis that would simply... say, “this is the direction of the

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music.

Clearly, the Graceland case raised complicated questions about stars' and local musicians' desires, and began what has been a fairly common string of recordings in which a famous western musician, such as David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, or Ry Cooder, collaborates, or curates, or brokers, local musicians, often accompanied by some controversy, or at least critical disapprobation.

Non-Western, or, more precisely, non-European and non-American musi­cians, have benefited from their work with Western stars and some have slowly become better known in the Western metropoles, though superstar­dom has proved elusive for all of them, hampered as they are by not singing in English to audiences who are accustomed to popular music in that language. But they well ensconced in university concert series, college radio, public radio in the USA, which has hosted a program called Afropop Worldwide since 1988.

These musicians, especially those from the African continent, continue to fight stereotypes that they are premodern people from the bush who are ignorant of the ways of the West, including its musics and technologies. The great Beninoise singer, Angelique Kidjo, said, “There is a kind of cultural racism going on where people think that African musicians have to make a certain kind of music.”^[389] Elsewhere, she said,

I won't do my music different to please some people who want to see something very traditional. The music I write is me. It's how I feel. If you want to see traditional music and exoticism, take a plane to Africa. They play that music on the streets. I'm not going to play traditional drums and dress like bush people. I'm not going to show my ass for any fucking white man. If they want to see it, they can go outside. I'm not here for that. I don't ask Americans to play country music.^[390]

Le Mystere des voixbulgares (1975)

In addition to Graceland, another extremely influential recording that helped to establish world music in retail establishments and in the musical culture of the west, Le Mystere des voix bulgares (“The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices”), was released in 1975 on a small label but received little attention until it was re-released in 1986 in the UK and the following year in the USA. The album was the result of many years of research by an ethnomusicologist and featured the sound of a Bulgarian women's chorus, a kind of music that frequently employ diaphanous harmonies, that is, harmonies based on sec­onds rather than thirds as in the western European tonal system mentioned earlier. This sound, unfamiliar to western ears as music and language, captivated many listeners. Jon Pareles observed in the New York Times that this music “suddenly became as hip as hip-hop,” and noted that the lack of information on the recording, including the absence of translations of song texts, “encouraged listeners to enjoy the music as a pure, alien emanation, immaculate and miraculous.”^[391] This album became an early world music best seller, and was even used in television advertisements. The “exotic” sound of a women's chorus singing in a language unknown to most listeners became such a “feature” of world music generally that women soloists or choruses singing in nonsense syllables are frequently used to simulate world music in film and broadcasting.^[392]

Other influential recordings

Other recordings were also influential in promoting the recognition of world music. One was rock musician Peter Gabriel's score to Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), released as an album in 1989 as Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ. Gabriel employed musics and musicians from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, though perhaps the most remarked-upon track was “Lazarus Raised,” featuring the duduk, a wind instrument from Central Asia. Its haunting sound has become familiar in soundtracks and recordings that sample world music. (A sample is a digital snippet of music or other sound that can be copied from one source and pasted into another.)

Another influential recording that helped to popularize world music was a recording entitled Deep Forest, which was released in 1992, and nominated for a Grammy award. The track “Sweet Lullaby” was a top 10 hit in the UK. This album, produced by two French musicians, featured infectious, danceable beats, electronic music, and samples of “pygmy” music - music by the Baka people of central Africa, and proved to be an unexpected hit, in part, I would venture, because of its romanticization and exoticization of “pygmies” as happy, premodern children.^[393] This album helped launch a new genre of techno music that made liberal use of samples of musics from around the world, though it had an important precursor in an album by Brian Eno and David Byrne from 1981, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.^[394]

Sampling and consumption

One of the contributing factors to conceptions of world music as something that could be appropriated with impunity was the rise of digital sampling. Sampling is a technique made possible by new digital technologies that permit users to copy exactly prerecorded music and incorporate it into their own music. Sampling was first common in hip hop but quickly spread to other kinds of popular musics. In the realm of electronic dance music, sampling of world music became quite common in certain subgenres. Electronic dance musicians came to think in terms of the “samplability” of recordings, recordings that featured snippets of music that were striking enough to be sampled and used in new music. One such musician was asked about whether he has musical ideas first, or if he works from samples. He responded,

It various [sic]. Sometimes I'll just come across something I think is amazing and I might be able to imagine a tune built around it. Other times I stockpile stuff and when I'm working on a tune if I need a male Arabic vocal to fit a section I'll see if I have anything which would be suitable. But it tends to vary. Sometimes a sample will suggest the whole tune to me, but not very often unfortunately. It would be far too easy if that happened all the time!^[395]

It is difficult to imagine an earlier musician conceptualizing music in this kind of digitized, atomized way. When Beethoven famously used the sound of a Turkish march in his ninth symphony, it was for a whole host of complex reasons - part fashionableness (for things Turkish were all the rage in Vienna at the time), part straightforward celebration, and part of a more complex form of celebration, since the Turks had very nearly taken his adopted city of Vienna in 1683.^[396]

The kind of extremely specific listening - or, to be more culturally and historically precise - consumption of music is not unique to musicians but is part of a culture in which consumption has come to play an ever-increasing role in people's leisure time and constructions of self. Sampling, as I have written elsewhere, emerged in a new moment of heightened consumption in the USA and the UK, when both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were promoting it as a way to boost the economy, in line with neoliberal ideologies.^[397] The sampler was invented as a machine to sample complex instrumental sounds as a short cut around attempting to synthesize them, but musicians soon began to use these new machines to sample pre-recorded music, launching a new relationship to music as we have seen.

The kind of relationship to music evident in sampling was not confined to hip hop or musicians who sampled, but has become increasingly common as listening habits, at least those of economic and social elites, have become increasingly eclectic. Sociological studies in the USA and several European countries have revealed classical music is no longer the primary music listened to by these groups, and that their members listen increasingly to a variety of musics, including world music, which has an audience mostly among educated middle-class people. This was perhaps first apparent with Le Mystere des voix bulgares, which one could find in many yuppie homes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Increasingly eclectic modes of listening have thus

Music on the move, as object, as commodity become the norm, at least among the upper classes in the USA.^[398] This, I have argued elsewhere, is a result of the growing importance of the ideology of the hip and the cool, which for decades has driven the advertising industry, which itself increasingly drives the production of culture generally.^[399]

But whatever social group is listening, musicians around the world now make and consume a dizzying variety of music, in large part because of digital technologies that make it instantly available, whether on YouTube, iTunes, or a streaming service such as Spotify or RDIO. Young Hopi musicians make reggae music, Japanese musicians make salsa music indistinguishable from their American and Caribbean counterparts as Orquesta de la Luz, Irish music grows in popularity around the world.^[400] Music, at least for those in wealthy countries, has become a just another commodity available to be consumed, or produced, the result of the long historical processes of objectification and commodification under consideration here.

World music today

World music in the West continues to enjoy the position of prestige it has slowly wrested from classical music as the music associated with elites, even though, like classical music, its sales remain small. Nonetheless, the presence of world music on BBC Radio 4, which once played classical music only but has added jazz and world music, is but one demonstration of the cultural prestige it enjoys today.

Music industries have sprung up around the world, particularly with the demise of the long-playing record and the rise of the cassette tape in the 1970s, which was much cheaper to produce. Today, populous countries such as

India and China are home to prodigious and sophisticated music industries. Chinese and Indian pop stars can sell millions of recordings. The center of Indian film production, Bollywood, releases around 1,000 films annually, most of which are musicals. The global flow of musics is omnidirectional, as it has been for many decades, though the most influential centers of production continue to be in the west. And some of these flows are not global but regional or transregional, as is the case with the movement of music across diasporas. In some cases, such as the Persian and Vietnamese communities in southern California, music and films are produced locally and sent back to audiences in Iran and Vietnam.^[401]

As musicians from outside of the West become increasingly connected to the west with digital technologies but, most especially, cellular phones that can exchange data, they increasingly position themselves in complex fashions as local, indigenous musicians rooted in ancient pasts, but at the same time part of a diaspora. Hip hop musicians in Dakar, Senegal, for example, appeal to the history of the griot, the bardic poets of parts of Africa, while fashioning hip hop musics that combine local sounds with transnational ones, viewing themselves as participating musically in a global black musical diaspora.^[402] Non-Western musicians who once wanted to become their country's version of Michael Jackson or Madonna now just as frequently seek connections with diasporic ethnic or racial groups. As a Malian hip hop musician, Amkoullel, said in a visit to Los Angeles, “We don't have an American dream. We have an African dream.”

Conclusions: schizophonia today

Today, it is not just sounds that have been separated from their makers, but listeners who have been separated from one another as well. The rise of the Sony Walkman, introduced in 1979, ushered in a new mode of listening privately to music in public. Technologically, this was possible long before the advent of the Walkman (even some very early radios were portable, and listening with headphones preceded listening with loudspeakers), but it wasn't until the rise of neoliberal ideologies of personalized consumption that such a mode of listening to music really became widespread.^[403] Later, with the development of the mp3 audio format system and mp3 players, and now, cellphones that play digital audio, personalized, individualized, atomized listening is quite common.

The experience of listening to music with friends, sharing music with friends with mix tapes or CDs is giving way to sharing music recommenda­tions online, through such services as Spotify, which offers streaming audio selections and is linked to Facebook, so one can share what one is listening to with one's friends. It is also possible to share playlists. This replacement of social listening with individualized listening which is then made social through software and services for which one pays is another marker of today's neoliberal world, in which, as Dumenil and Levy have observed, social relationships are commercialized.^[404]

The sociologist Alfred Schutz wrote famously in the 1950s that wherever there is music, there is something social, a “mutual tuning-in relationship,” even when music is mechanically reproduced.^[405] But with social relationships increasingly mediated by commercial interests, I wonder if this mutual relationship is waning. The atomized, disjunct nature of the production of music today is mirrored in its consumption.

Further reading and listening

Primary materials

Bartok, Bela. “The influence of peasant music on modern music,” in Benjamin Suchoff (ed.), Bela Bartok Essays. London: Faber & Faber, 1976.

“The relation of folk song to the development of the art music of our time,” in Benjamin Suchoff (ed.), Bela Bartok Essays. London: Faber & Faber, 1976.

Copeland, Stewart. Liner notes to The Rhythmatist. A&M CD 5084, 1985. Denselow, Robin. “We created world music.” Guardian, June 29, 2004, 10.

Lockspeiser, Edward. Debussy: His Life and Mind, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1978. Marks, Toby. n.d. “Banco de Gaia” interview. www.chaoscontrol.com/archive2/banco/ bancosamples.html. This URL is no longer active.

Stockhausen, Karlheinz. “World Music.” Translated by Bernard Radloff. Dalhousie Review 69 (1989), 318-326.

Discography

Deep Forest. 550 Music/Epic BK-57840, 1992.

Eno, Brian and David Byrne. My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Sire/Warner Bros. 9 45374-2,1981. Copeland, Stewart. The Rhythmatist. A&M CD 5084,1985.

Gabriel, Peter. Passion: Music for The Last Temptation of Christ. Geffen Records M5 G 24206,1989.

Simon, Paul. Graceland. Warner Bros. W2-25447, 1986.

Filmography

Paul Simon: Born at the Right Time. Directed by Susan Lacy and Susan Steinberg, 1991.

Secondary materials

Appert, Catherine. “Rappin' griots: producing the local in Senegalese hip hop,” in P. Khalil Saucier (ed.), Native Tongues: An African Hip-Hop Reader. Trenton, nj: Africa World Press, 2011.

Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. New York: Verso, 1994.

Bellman, Jonathan, ed. The Exotic in Western Music. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.

Blank-Edelman, David N. 1994. “Stewart Copeland: the rhythmatist returns,” RMM, February, 38-9.

Born, Georgina and David Hesmondhalgh, eds. Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 2000.

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