ABSTRACT
Administrators and policy makers in a number of cities worldwide are increasingly seeking to utilise local music to promote their cities' cultures and increase tourism and trade. As the most sophisticated configuration of human existence, the city enjoys obvious advantages, primarily density. Particularly since the 1700s, the experience of city life has been layered with governmental, social and corporate developments that attest to modernity, incorporating an increasingly global interdependence in finance, trade, transport, communication and other systems of the 'modern' city. As with many of the international cities that have sought to leverage their cultural and musical assets for economic advantage, in Melbourne the turn to culture as economic 'saviour' was a product of crisis rather than a grassroots evolutionary movement. One important way in which music comes to be seen as central to the identity of a place is through the way it can create a connection to the past.
