Western Music and Its Others

This innovative collection of articles offers a major comprehensive overview of new developments in cultural theory as applied to western music. Addressing a broad range of primarily 20th century music, the authors examine two related phenomena: musical borrowing or appropriations, and how music has been used to construct, evoke, or represent difference of a musical or a socio-cultural kind. The essays scrutinise a diverse body of music and discuss a range of significant examples, among them musical modernism’s idealising or ambivalent relations with popular, ethnic, and non-western music; exoticism and orientalism in the experimental music tradition; the representation of others in Hollywood film music; music’s role in the formation and contestation of collective identities, with reference to Jewish and Turkish popular music; and issues of representation and difference in jazz, world music, hip, hop, and electronic dance music.
Written by leading scholars from disciplines including historical musicology, sociology, ethno-musicology, anthropology, popular music studies and film studies, the essays provide unprecedented insights into how cultural identities and differences are const

Author Biography

Georgina Born lectures on the sociology of culture at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of Emmanuel College in Cambridge. She is the author of Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (California, 1995). David Hesmondhalgh is Research Fellow in Sociology at the Open University.