Essay 5 - Allison Cuculich - Music Builds a Transnational Bond

Music Builds a Transnational Bond

The multiple communities that we feel we are a part of helps in building our identity as a whole.  Almost everyone has that sense of belonging as though they have their foot in a number of doors, all leading to separate cultures and communities of people.  This idea of a transnational civil society, as made popular by Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi, is one that does not exist in present day but is something that can be more easily achieved than the old notion of a single global culture (1996).  The fact that there is an abundance of communities that exist, almost guarantees that there is not going to be one community that can contain everyone in the world.

Music has developed into a booming medium that draws people in collectively, its own community.  The way that music has become such a strong community is because of the support of almost everyone throughout the world.  There are other media forms that are easy for people to reject or deny because they do not believe in what is being presented or accept it, but music is a form that many more embrace.  Within the much larger category of the music community, there are the subcategories of genres and even smaller lays the millions upon millions of individual musicians and bands.  Immanuel Kant had this belief about an aesthetic community that is essentially ?a community that forms and undoes itself on the basis of taste?(Erlmann, 1998, p. 12).  If there were ever a perfect example of an aesthetic community, music would be the poster child.

Even more so than movies, musical events have the ability to draw in large numbers of people into the same venue to experience the sounds that attract them to their community.  This makes music a very rare transnational community because everyone who feels a part of the specific community that a particular band is a part of can listen to their music from the privacy of their own homes as well as come to a venue that the musicians are actually live to perform in. Music that has not been recorded naturally becomes open to the public as it is played out loud for ears to receive.  Obviously, nowadays you have to pay a fluctuating amount of money to see the musicians in good ear shot that you are fans of, but there will always be the free-loaders and passersby that could potentially hear this music (Lange, 2005, p. 1). 

Pulling this concept together can be further supported by the vision of the perfect sphere by Habermas.  This idea is that this social space in which our communities exist are not determined by the geographical space that they stem from or by the market system (Sreberny-Mohammadi, 1996, p. 9).  For the musical community, this means it will be a seamless transition between countries without hesitation to listen based on the nation ties.  This is already in the works as so many musicians today allow themselves to market into a variety of countries.  There are many reasons that musicians want to pursue a career in other countries than their own, and being unsuccessful in their native has proven to rank among the top.  The example of the slave girl that was not allowed to publish in America, sought after other countries outside where she lived to share her works with (Gilroy, 1996, p. 18) is a similar story to many musicians who are looking for a career but are seemingly forced to pursue that dream outside of their country.

Music is a staple in the progression towards transnational communities developing.  There is this world which has produced so many types of music and an extraordinary amount of musicians, and is still able to keep a constantly massive fan base.  Music is one of the communities that reach almost everyone, globally, and people can count as one of the communities that they belong to.

References

Erlmann, V.  (1998).  How beautiful is small? Music, globalization and the aesthetic of the local.  Yearbook for Traditional Music, 30 12-21.

Gilroy, P.  (1996).  Route work:  The black atlantic and the politics of exile.  In The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, 17-29.

Lange, R.  (2005).  Is digitized music becoming a quasi-public good?  Conference Papers ? International Communication Association, 1-26.

Srenberny-Mohammadi, A.  (1996).  Globalization, communication and transnational civil society:  Introduction.  In S. Braman and A. Sreberny-Mohammadi (Eds.), Globalization, communication and transnational civil society, 1-19.

Posted at 09:59PM Jun 21, 2007 by CUCULICH, ALLISON in General  |  Comments[6]