Music and Place

This chapter examines the idea of spatial fixity, where continuity is valued over change, stability preferred to cycles of fashion, and which links music to particular places and establishes those links as traditions and genuine aspects of local cultures. It examines how authenticity is constructed for particular styles, genres, artists and releases. Such authenticity, as we discuss here, is in part constructed by attempts to embed music in place. This occurs in a number of ways: through ethnomusicological practice, in various mobilisations of tradition, in discursive constructions of place by songwriters and in the way that audiences receive music. Fixity is thus complex – no one theory could examine all permutations of the links between music and place. A sense of fixity is usually implied whenever music is discussed for pre-capitalist societies, both in relation to the cultural and geographical origins of music, but also through the link to nostalgia – related to yearnings for past glories, lost youth and claims for styles of music that evade the ‘corrupting’ influences of contemporary society and economy. The early part of the chapter considers the role of ethnomusicology in examining remaining fragments of ‘traditional’ music, which imply discussion of ancient and unchanging times; yet ethnomusicology is primarily part of a modern era, to some extent a response to cultural change under colonial and capitalist expansion. The moment of commodification – as music is transformed from cultural expression to product, as traditions are usurped by change – is crucial. Binary relations established in considering such commodification constantly appear – between‘tradition’ and‘contemporary’ in folk revivals, in‘regional’ traditions and in various expressions of‘roots’in music. Unpacking fixity implies that we begin by examining more closely notions of ‘traditional’ music and commodification, as they establish the character of a particular form of authenticity.