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Music on the Move: Traditions and Mass MediaAuthor(s): Krister MalmSource: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 37, No. 3, (Autumn, 1993), pp. 339-352Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for EthnomusicologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/851718Accessed: 28/04/2008 20:21

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ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

Music on the Move: Traditions and Mass Media

KRISTER MALM THE SWEDISH NATIONAL COLLECTIONS OF MUSIC

MUSIKMUSEET, STOCKHOLM

he dissemination of music by mass media had already begun at the start of this century.1 Due to the restrictive effects of patents regarding

recording and playback hardware, the music industry was limited to a few companies right from the outset. To sell the hardware these companies also had to provide the software. The companies soon learned that there was no music that could be sold to everybody, even in a small nation. They had to release records with musics of different ethnic groups, geographical areas and social strata. People would not buy the phonographs and gramophones unless there was familiar music available to play back on these machines. This led to a boom of recording activities in all continents.

A basic economic law of mass production reads: the more units of the same product you can sell, the bigger the profit. This law also applies to the music industry. It was inevitable that the production of records gradually was reduced to the kinds of music that could be sold in the biggest market, which was and still is the United States. This meant a concentration mainly on United States' popular music styles. Countries outside the big markets in the United States and Western Europe were, in the business jargon, lumped together as "the rest of the world." They became on the one hand places for extra sales of products produced for the big markets, and on the other providers of musical raw material to be processed by the industry.

Improved communications and the worldwide breakthrough of transis- torized amplifiers and cassette technology along with other developments around 1970 marked the start of a boom in mass media dissemination of music. Within a few years at the beginning of the 1970s, the technology to

1This article is a revised version of the Charles Seeger Lecture presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Chicago on 12 October 1991.

? 1993 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

339

VOL. 37, NO. 3 FALL 1993

340 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1993

record and play back music became available in the remotest villages before

they had roads, piped water or public electricity. The international stars of the day like The Beatles, ABBA and Boney M became known in all parts of the world. For the first time in history the world had a generation growing up with a common musical experience added to the specific experiences they had within their respective local music cultures. The fact that music is

readily available almost anywhere has changed lifestyles. For example, in Sweden the time spent by the citizens listening to recorded music qua- drupled between 1970 and 1976.

We of course must ask, What role has this growing transnational cultural

experience played in the remarkable developments on the international

political scene during the past few years? Unfortunately, the full answer is

beyond the scope of this article.

My research colleague Roger Wallis and I have used the model shown in Figure 1 to map out technological, economic, and organizational (including legal) developments and their effects on musical life on three levels: the international, the national, and the local. The interaction between these three levels was also interpreted with the help of this model.

I will not go into any details regarding the technological, economic or

organizational developments here; I have done this together with Roger Wallis in a number of papers, the latest one presented at the conference of the International Music Council in Cologne (Malm 1992) and in a forthcom-

ing book (Malm and Wallis 1993). I will rather use the three levels of action- the local, the national or in some cases regional, and international level- to line out some of the effects of these developments on music traditions or, to twist the words around, on traditional musics. I will illustrate my points mainly with cases from Sweden. I know from the data we have collected that I could have chosen almost any other country and I would have found

parallels to the Swedish examples. As I mentioned above, one of the most important effects of these

structural developments is that an increasing amount of music is dissemi- nated by mass media-that is, it is being mediated. Before going into the

specific effects of dissemination by mass media let me sketch a simplified framework for the interaction between musics. The patterns of interaction can be reduced to four basic categories.

The first pattern is cultural exchange, which has taken place since

people began to travel (see figure 2). This often occurs on a person-to- person level. Traveling musicians in Europe have picked up ways of making music by playing with musicians in foreign countries since the Middle Ages. In Sweden local musicians have started to play with immigrant musicians from Greece or Turkey, and new styles have resulted.

FIGURE 1: Misc Interaction Model

IMPORTANT FACTORS ORGANISATIONS

International International conventions associations and agreements*-- and organisations

MUSIC II

NATIONAL ORGANISATIONS

Owned by na ? government bodies ? phonogram co * trade associations * studios ? copyright societies ? pressing plant! ? unions ? cassette dupli( ? music associations and societies * distribution oul

National * religious bodies * publishers * music instrumi

legislation ~*? music hardwai

National government implementation policies

Sponsorship activities

Cultural climate Local government

Cultural Music societies heritage -

tionals

,mpanies

s catlon Ilets

snts re

Transnational music industry Related media and International (production - distribution) electronics industry technological.

economic and organisational developments

International trends in

music/entertainment

/ \ / NDUSTRY OTHER MUSIC MEDIA MUSIC

BUSINESS EDUCATION AND TRAINING (formal)

Subsidiaries of transnatlonals

* phonogram companies * studios * pressing plants * cassette duplication ? distribution ? publishing * music instruments * music hardware

* 'show business' * promotion * management * concert agents

* radio * TV * press * film/video

National economic

climate

Musical subcultuies

MUSIC: performance - use - creation - training (informat)

AREAS OF ACTIVITY

IMPORTANT FACTORS D_ _ I_ __ I____ _ _I ___ _

__

342 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1993

FIGURE 2: Cultural Exchange (Figures 2-5 drawn by Ake Eriksson)

The second pattern is cultural dominance (see figure 3). In this case, one culture-usually that of a powerful society or group in a society-is imposed on another in a more or less formally organized fashion. Priests who told Swedish folk fiddlers that the violin was the invention of the Devil, or missionaries who had similar things to say in Africa about drums, are two obvious examples.

The third pattern is cultural imperialism (see figure 4). Here cultural dominance is augmented by the transfer of money and/or resources, such as gifted musicians, from the dominated to the dominating cultural group. Examples of money transfer are profits made by subsidiaries of record companies belonging to the dominant culture, or copyright money. In the latter case, despite the notion of exchange embodied in international copyright agreements, the money flow is overwhelmingly in the direction of

Music on the Move: Traditions and Mass Media

FIGURE 3: Cultural Dominance

the base countries of the transnational music industry. Jamaica has received very little copyright money from the millions of radio plays reggae music has received around the world. Bob Marley even transferred the right to collect his copyright income to the United States organization ASCAP.

The three patterns described above were joined in the 1970s by a fourth pattern, transculturation (see figure 5). This is the result of the growth of the transnational corporations in the field of culture as well as their world-wide marketing networks. Transculturation involves the combination of stylistic elements from several kinds of music taking place in the industrial environment. Thus, transcultural music is an industrial product without roots in any specific ethnic group. The transcultural music styles are cross- nationally disseminated through a wide range of media. Disco music as played by Boney M in the 1970s was probably the first truly transcultural music. The process of transculturation aims at the creation of musical styles that are the lowest common denominators for the biggest possible market.

343

344 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1993

FIGURE 4: Cultural Imperialism

Today all four basic cultural exchange patterns exist side by side and intermingled. An increasing number of national and local musics pick up elements from transcultural music. Also more and more national and local musics contribute features to transcultural music, or as the industry labels it, World Beat or World Music.

What is then the role of the mass media in these processes of change? I can see two main kinds or patterns of impact. The first one has to do with the processes that take place when music meets the mass media system- that is, when the music becomes mediated. Roger Wallis and I coined the term mediaization to denote the process in which a music is changed through interaction with the mass media system (Wallis and Malm 1984:278- 281).

Mediaization has many aspects. The recording studio is a very different environment from the live scene with its direct interaction within the group of performers and/or between artists and audience. The process whereby music is fed through the recording studio and a distribution system involving radio broadcasts, disc jockeys and other gate-keepers, record shops, and so forth, changes and shapes the musical tradition involved.

In the studio environment feedback from the media system and market hits the performers directly. Here they are confronted with record producers, microphones, multitrack and digital technology, new kinds of instruments, sampling, and so on. Interestingly, performers of traditional musics quite

Music on the Move: Traditions and Mass Media

FIGURE 5: Transculturation

Kultur 1 Kultur 2 Kultur 3 Kultur 4 Kultur 5

quickly learn how to handle the machines they happen to stumble on in the studio. They are of course helped along by technicians and professional session musicians. For example, about 1980 the popular Tunisian singer and musician Zoubaier discovered a syntheziser in a recording studio and almost immediately understood that this could facilitate his work at traditional weddings. A few years later the syntheziser had substituted for the mezued (a Tunisian bagpipe) in a lot of Tunisian bands playing at traditional festivities. Soon of course the new keyboard musicians went on from merely imitating the mezuedsound to experiments with new sounds, thus gradually changing the traditions.

Very soon after the introduction of microphones and electrical recording technology Bing Crosby, Whispering Jack Smith, and others discovered a new way to change the timbre of the voice. With a microphone you could sing softly and intimately. The same discovery is today made by prayer callers in remote villages of the Arab world as they try to make work easier

345

346 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1993

through the use of cassette recorders and public address systems. Their style of singing has been changed in very much the same way as that of the United States' popular singers.

A quite interesting mediaization incident happened recently in Sweden. A musician belonging to the Wagogo people of central Tanzania came to Sweden alone. When I first met him in 1973 in the village of Buigiri in the Dodoma region, he was a young boy well versed in traditional music. He started to play Swahili pop music in the mid-seventies and learned to handle electric guitars and keyboards. He also made a few recordings in simple studios in Nairobi. In Sweden he was for the first time confronted with a modern studio and its equipment. He picked up the possibilities of this environment at an amazing pace. In just a matter of two days he had recorded five pieces applying the potential of the studio to his Tanzanian musical heritage, singing and playing all the parts himself. He was quite happy to be able to put together music that in a traditional context would have required quite a big group of performers. The result was a music that basically is stuctured like traditional Wagogo music, but with new sounds such as sampled and electronic drums, synthesized bass and computer-generated glissandi.

In the mid-eighties, Swedish popular dance bands discovered that computers could do a lot of their work. These bands play at dance halls and hotels, in some seasons every night of the week. Their musical style, containing a number of standard melodic phrases, sounds, and rhythmic patterns, developed during the early 1960s and has not changed very much since then. Now these bands have all the basic patterns along with the special patterns and gimmicks for specific tunes programmed into a computer. They still hold their guitars and horns, but they don't play them in the traditional way any more. They just use them to feed the computer with information on how to execute the computer sound files. This means they set the tempo, some of the phrasing and so forth. The singing is still a live performance. The musicians now can concentrate more on the singing since they don't have to do as much with their hands as they used to.

The technological knowhow created through the traditional Swedish dance bands' computer use laid part of the foundation of the music of the Swedish group Roxette. This group is a very efficient industrial music- making unit with only two members and a lot of computer power. Roxette has reached the top American pop music charts a number of times during the past years.

Another common feature of the mediaization process is that textual content is changed. This has happened to many traditional musics. The process has two main components. If the performers of a traditional music want access to the broadcasting media, the gate-keepers want the lyrics to comply with generally accepted public speech behaviour. This means no

Music on the Move: Traditions and Mass Media 347

offensive language, nothing obscene, and no odd political statements. The other component is the record producers' ambition to reach an international audience. Thus all allusions to local incidents and conditions in the lyrics must be eliminated. A notable case is Trinidadian calypso which had texts with an exclusively local content. As long as calypso for the international market was just covers by people like Harry Belafonte, the original texts needed only slight changes to be more comprehensible to an international audience. This did not affect the style of calypso in Trinidad. When some of the original Trinidadian calypsonians, like four-times calypso monarch The Mighty Duke, were launched on the international market both the musical style and the content of the text were affected. The calypso beat was influenced by soul music and changed into soca-that is, soul calypso. The tempo increased, and the local content of the lyrics was changed to simple exclamations about the happiness of being at a party. The most common word in soca texts of the 1980s must be "party," and now it has no reference to political parties.

References to the record business in calypso and soca lyrics increased, mirroring the new situation. Quite a few calypsos concern cassette piracy and the end of record pressing plants in Trinidad. Texts referring to the life and conditions of the singer himself are also a sign of the gradual isolation of the professionalized performer from everyday life that comes with mediaization.

During the past few decades many local music traditions have been integrated into the media output and gradually mediaized. This means that these musics go through a process whereby they can compete and perhaps survive in the media environment. At the same time they are running the risk of being sucked into the transculturation process and losing their specific properties, ending up as a component in some "world music" style.

But dissemination on recorded media has also given music traditions another kind of chance to survive and develop. This brings us to the second main pattern of change through the impact of mass media. With media distribution a music, at least as sound structure, is freed from the boundaries of time and space. This means that a certain kind of music can suddenly start to influence what happens in a time and place very distant from its origin. One may say that this has been going on since the notation of music was invented. A sound recording, however, carries a lot more information about a music style than notation does, and can be decoded by anyone with playback equipment and without the painstaking process of learning how to read and write music. With music video clips and video documentaries, often supplemented by printed matter, the amount of information that is mediated grows.

The movement of musical sound in time and space is a kind of transplantation of music. The transplantation processes become more and

348 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1993

more visible as the years pass. Transplantation results from the following: (a) the amount of available recorded music grows, (b) access to recording and playback facilities increases all over the world, and (c) networks are created between different music traditions due to better communications nationally and internationally. These networks can be formal like organiza- tions and fan clubs. They can also be rather informal or linked to extra- musical activities like tourism.

The first musics transplanted through media dissemination were Afro- American musics like jazz and blues that were close to the strongholds of the music industry. And when I say "transplanted" I mean that these music styles not merely influenced other musics, but actually were copied in detail by musicians in distant places like Sweden, where the process was already apparent in the 1930s.

A jam session with trumpeter Thore Erling, tenor man Silas Gbrling and some other Swedes in 1936 shows that these Swedish musicians were able to play idiomatically correct jazz music of the mid-1930s (Jederby et al. 1936). Thus, jazz music had moved from various local levels to the U.S. national level in the 1920s and onto the international level with the swing era in the 1930s, and then to the national and even local level again in countries like Sweden. Most of the time copying also leads to changes. Ten years after this recording Swedish musicians like Stan Hasselgard and Lars Gullin had developed a Swedish sound in jazz which the music industry fed into the international scene.

This movement of music from the periphery to a center and from this center again to other points of the periphery is of course nothing new. It has happened time and time again within the patterns of exchange I described before. But the. speed of this process and the number of points on the periphery affected has in the past decade increased with satellite and other cross-national mediation of music in a way that amounts to a quantum leap.

The number of possible variants of this process have also grown, and the main direction of influence can vary. It can be mainly from the national to the local level. For example, radio and television has been used a lot in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and a number of Third World countries to establish musical styles sanctioned by the central government on the local level. There are also more and more incidents of music moving from one local community to another. In Belgium and France people perform specific styles of Swedish fiddle and keyed fiddle folk music. In Stockholm we have quite a few groups playing batucada from Rio de Janeiro, Cajun music, Trinidadian steelband, and many other kinds of music.

The samba groups and steelbands have also brought with them the carnaval context of their music. A decade ago there were no carnivals in Sweden. Around 1980 the first carnivals were arranged in a few towns. Last

Music on the Move: Traditions and Mass Media 349

year carnivals took place in more than a hundred towns and communities in Sweden. Very few of the performers in the carnival bands have actually visited a carnival in Port of Spain or Rio. Their information comes from the media.

The flow of mediated music styles directly from one local level to another is a significant development. But the most significant development during the past decade is that direct communication between the interna- tional and the local level has rapidly increased. The general pattern used to be that an international music was first launched on the national level via subsidiaries of international record companies, national broadcasting media and educational systems. After passing the national level it diffused into the local level. This pattern is no longer the main one. It has been broken by transborder satellite broadcasting, cable systems, community radio and television stations, and the effective distribution of international hit music on the local level carried out by agents and cassette pirates in most countries where satellite dishes are not that common. Small local radio and television stations frequently, legally or illegally, take their music from satellite dishes. In some cases government television companies have taken most of their music video clips off the dishes. When the question of copyright is brought up with government officials, they argue that nobody in their country asked the transborder broadcasting companies to send the music into their national airspace. They say: "If they don't want us to take it, they should keep it out of our airspace."

The international and transcultural musics set standards for local musicians in different ways. Some young aspiring musicians who dream of world fame will try to copy the styles of the superstars. Others will opt for a local or national career and may try to blend international styles with their local styles. The result is an increasing amount of what might be called "media music hybrid styles" on the local level. In Sweden we have many of these hybrid styles. There are rock groups singing in the South Saami language which is only spoken by some thousand persons. Thus the status of international rock music is used to keep an endangered language going. Another example is the Swedish musician Peps Persson singing reggae in a local Swedish dialect (Persson 1975).

When music is transplanted over time one immediately comes across the phenomenon of "renewal." All over the world young musicians searching for their roots dig up old recordings and try to revive kinds of music that may not have been played for decades. In some cases this even leads to a kind of musical fundamentalism. Some revivers of a style copy the recordings in detail and are very intolerant of any changes. Thus they are petrifying styles which in living tradition many times had a lot of leeway for variations. Sometimes unique stylistic traits are exaggerated in a way that has been

350 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1993

termed "mannerism." In the folk fiddling revival of the 1970s in Sweden, recordings of certain local fiddlers became the norm for a lot of young fiddlers, who in many cases adopted a purist attitude.

The cases of transplantation of music that are most dependent on the media are those over both space and time. Again I can mention a few Swedish examples. In the 1950s quite a few bands playing New Orleans jazz started in Stockholm. Many of these are still active, and new ones appear on the scene every year. Another example is the case of the balalaika bands that were established in several towns in Sweden during the 1970s. They were and are playing in styles used in the Soviet Union in the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps these Swedish groups will soon be the only ones carrying on this musical tradition.

There are also groups specializing in the music of certain musicians or orchestras. For example one Swedish band plays the music of the U.S. Luis Russel big band of 1928-29. The style and repertory have been copied from records (Kustbandet 1988). According to jazz specialists, a similar band can hardly be found in the U.S. Another band plays the music that was played in Martinique and Guadeloupe in the 1920s (Sumpens Swingsters 1984). Its traditional Creole style of clarinet playing is hard to find in the French West Indies today.

Thus at the same time that new musics are created out of new conditions, traditional styles can be kept alive by an international network of specialized performers spread out sometimes quite haphazardly around the world. When studying local musics in the future we may also have to look for performers of older types of this music not only in countries to which people from the community in question have migrated, but also in places to which the recordings of the music may have migrated. Perhaps young performers from Guadeloupe wanting to revive old local performing styles in the future have to come to Sweden to study how the Miller-Albert system Creole clarinet is played.

We will also see more cases of musical round trips like the one that happened when jazz went to Sweden and returned to the United States, or when the Caribbean music created by the slaves from Africa then returned to Africa on records and caused the emergence of high life and Congolese pop music, which in turn at the beginning of the 1970s returned to the Caribbean and was eagerly devoured by young musicians seeking their African roots.

An important input into the rap and hip hop music of today came from Jamaican disc jockeys who did "toasting overdubs," speaking rhythmically over a recorded foundation, usually a remixed "version" of a tune without the soloists. Now the rap and hip hop music has made its way back to Jamaica.

Music on the Move: Traditions and Mass Media 351

All the processes I have sketched in this paper overlap and interact with each other and with other processes of change. Sometimes there are synergy effects, other times they cancel each other out. At this point Charles Seeger would probably have summarized the situation with a big diagram describ- ing the processes taking place when music traditions and mass media meet. I'm not quite ready to do that yet.

We have seen that the media both can contribute to the safeguarding of music traditions and to their remodelling or even destruction. The media also constantly contribute to the emergence of new traditions. The increased direct interaction between international and local level means that govern- ments and other actors on the national level have lost a lot of their power to influence developments through policy making. In this situation the commercial market forces may take over completely and we can end up with ONE PLANET-ONE MUSIC, as the motto of the MTV music video channel goes.

Given this situation, I think it is very important to boost the informal international networks between music organizations and individual enthu- siasts active at the national and local levels. These networks are today the most important agents for spreading music traditions that are not part of the commercial system. The enthusiasts and their networks are the only guarantee that at least some music traditions can live and develop according to conditions laid down by social, phsycological and physical needs and not only according to conditions laid down by the market.

As I have shown, media both preserve and change music traditions. I will give you a last Swedish example that illustrates the more and more common phenomenon that the same individual can take part in both the preservation and the changing of a tradition. The young musician AsaJinder plays the unique Swedish instrument nyckelharpa, the keyed fiddle. At sixteen she won the highest Swedish award for performance of traditional music from Uppland, the region where she grew up. She also performs on the same instrument, but with added electronic facilities.

I hope that young people like AsaJinder who can master both traditional ways of making music and the world of electronic media will get a chance to set the scene for future traditional musics, rather than the music machines of the industry.

References

Jederby, Thore, et al. 1936. "I Can't Give You Anything but Love." Thore Jederby "Jamgrupp." Sound Test Sonora Studio, Stockholm, September 1936. Issued on Caprice CAP 2010, Stockholm 1982.

Kustbandet. 1988. The New Call of the Freaks. Stomp Off Records. SOS 1178. Stockholm. Malm, Krister. 1992. "Local, National and International Musics: A Changing Scene of Interac-

tion." In World Music-Musics of the World: Aspects of Documentation, Mass Media

352 Ethnomusicology, Fall 1993

andAcculturation, edited by M. P. Baumann, 211-17. Intercultural Music Studies 3. Berlin: International Institute for Traditional Music.

Maim, Krister, and Roger Wallis. 1992. Media Policy and Music Activity. London: Routledge. Persson, Peps. 1975. Hog Standard. Peps' Blodsband. Sonet SLP 2572. Stockholm. Sumpens Swingsters. 1984. Valse d'amour. Swamp Records SWLP 834. Stockholm. Wallis, Roger, and Krister Malm. 1984. Big Sounds from Small Peoples: The Music Industry in

Small Countries. London: Constables.