ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the different forms of mobility linked to music. Music, like all forms of sound, is inherently mobile. Mobility also involves movements of people, and the music they bring with them (Chapter 8). Recordings themselves move as objects – as treasured artefacts of lives and places, traded through migrant links across countries, underpinning musical economies or sustaining diasporic connections. Mobility is also responsible for performance types and musical spaces rebuilt in new circumstances as the result of flows of music, rekindling traditions or inspiring unexpected borrowings and appropriations. The movement of sonic objects – CDs, instruments, recording technologies – highlights the centrality of technology in discussions of mobility and music, a theme that reverberates throughout this chapter. Music is rarely, if ever, made beyond technology (even a cappella vocal performances often take place in sites chosen because of their particular harmonic qualities), and technology invariably prefigures mobility. Technological developments in music have been intimately connected to industrialisation, colonialism, urbanisation and associated social change. Technologies transform spaces of consumption, as different generations navigate the trends and styles of contemporary popular culture.
