How Beautiful Is Small? Music, Globalization and the Aesthetics of the Local

Abstract

Almost 200 years ago, Immanuel Kant developed the notion of the aesthetic community: a community that forms and undoes itself on the basis of taste. Aesthetic communities are strangely ambivalent formations, marked by the Kantian antinomy of judgements of taste. On the one hand, they emerge out of the “hope,” as Kant puts it in Critique of Judgement, for unanimity. But because, on the other hand, the basis for such communities lies in subjective tastes and in divergent notions of what is beautiful, aesthetic communities can never reach a status of stability and permanence. Aesthetic communities, then, for Kant are more an idea, a promise, than they are a concrete reality. What keeps aesthetic communities alive is that this promise is never fulfilled. Like clouds, they must disappear the moment they take shape.

Musical Faces of Croatian Multiculturality

“…It also presupposes intentionality, diversely imagined and practiced communities, states of in-betweenness, of being both and neither, playfulness, pleasure, and consumption (cf. Bhabha 1994;Werbner 2001;Erlmann 1998). Both aspects are present in the case of Afton, and thus it is appropriate to talk about the band within the notion of hybridity.…”

World music: deterritorializing place and identity

“…More generally, world music exemplified a 'fetishization of marginality' and an essentialist identification of cultural practices in developing countries with otherness itself (Erlmann, 1996;Mitchell, 1996). This fetishization was part of a broader trend to seek out cultures that were stable and introspective, relatively untouched by processes of commodification, otherwise most evident in some forms of tourism, which exaggerate, reify and romanticize the extent to which any culture, and place, is isolated from others (Erlmann, 1998).…”

“…More generally, world music exemplified a 'fetishization of marginality' and an essentialist identification of cultural practices in developing countries with otherness itself (Erlmann, 1996;Mitchell, 1996). This fetishization was part of a broader trend to seek out cultures that were stable and introspective, relatively untouched by processes of commodification, otherwise most evident in some forms of tourism, which exaggerate, reify and romanticize the extent to which any culture, and place, is isolated from others (Erlmann, 1998). Exceptionally, this is part of a tendency to eulogize Africa, and African 'roots', above and beyond that of other nonwhite people, such as Asians, let alone minority white groups; racism has often resulted in African Americans being seen as more 'authentic' in terms of musical (and sexual and sporting) expressions of the body, whereas Europeans have often been associated more with the mind and less spontaneous types of musical performance (Gilroy, 1993).…”

“…While origins in distant and developing countries conferred local authenticity, tensions remained in the placelessness of certain forms of consumption: world music constituted 'the ubiquitous nowhere of the international financial markets and the Internet' (Erlmann, 1996: 475). In most extreme form, it has been claimed both that world music constitutes 'the soundscape of a universe which underneath the rhetoric of roots has forgotten its own genesis' (Erlmann, 1996: 477) and that, in the context of a review of a recording of sacred flute music from Papua New Guinea, it has 'a real capacity for getting inside another culture, then extracting the creative essence of that culture to whet the insatiable curiosity of people who listen to their own inner muse' (Diaspora 3, 2000: 33). At one level the rise of world music emphasized the importance of the 'local' in global commodity flows; at another it drew little-known places and performers into global markets and culture.…”

“…The expansion of global markets for popular music did not merely entail one-way traffic. Every stage of the commercialization of popular music incorporated 'alien' elements, though often substantially modified to suit northern tastes and prejudices (Erlmann, 1999). Throughout the colonial era, shows, exhibitions and festivals were established in major European cities.…”