Keith Howard Inaugural Lecture: Live Music Versus Audio Tourism: world music and the changing music industry

Key information

Date
Time
5:30 pm to 7:00 pm
Venue
Brunei Gallery
Room
Lecture Theatre

About this event

Professor Keith Howard

Chair : Professor Jonathan Stock, University of Sheffield

Professor Paul Webley, Director and Principal of SOAS, will preside.

In his inaugural lecture Professor Keith Howard will discuss the implications of the oral qualities of musical communication

The academic discipline of ethnomusicology gives central importance to fieldwork, to documentation and – increasingly – to learning from expert teachers how to perform. Ethnomusicologists promote, through rarely profitable recordings, books and concerts, their take on the social and cultural distinctiveness of specific world musics. Joining them, UNESCO, in its Intangible Cultural Convention and ‘Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Mankind’, and along with member states from Korea to Japan and Yakutia to Uzbekistan, now seeks both to preserve ‘traditional’ musics and to promote them. Music is now marketed along with World Heritage Sites for domestic and international tourism. Music has become an icon of identity.

In contrast, the established music industry, entangled with issues of politics and control, promotes World Music. Critics argue that World Music promotes a new aesthetic form of the global imagination by packaging products in a homogeneous, flashy, but shallow way in order to generate profits. Audiences listen, in their own homes, in concert halls or at festivals, posing as audio tourists who no longer need to travel.

Worldwide, musicians make choices as they move between local and global systems, as they travel the world to perform, reinforcing soundworlds from the local or capitulating to the global. What, then, are the potential futures for World Music and the academic discipline of ethnomusicology?

This Inaugural Lecture is available in hard copy - ISBN 978 07286 0385 1

Organiser: SOAS