ABSTRACT
Tradition may be “a cosmic game of ‘telephone,’” so suggests a most eminent musicologist cum music critic of our times (Taruskin 1995: 267), and who can argue with this insightful poetic image. Tradition can also be more generally conceptualized as all that modernity saw as preceding it (AlSayyad 2004), a construct problematized by Fabian for whom the binary tradition/modernity was, in short, “(bad) metaphorical talk” (2002 [1983]: 155). No matter what tradition is considered to be in our days, it always seems to convey a sense of urgency, a need of protection, of working against its inevitable change by setting its accepted limits (Gelbart 2007: 171); it either has to be “held onto, recover[ed], or restore[ed]” or is in a “seemingly desperate situation” (Gross 1992: 4). Anttonen (2005) on the other hand suggests the concept of “non-modernity” instead of “tradition,” which he argues can be represented only through modern mediation, making the representations of non-modernity (aka tradition) epistemologically modern. Finally, Glassie’s highly suggestive opening to his classic article on “tradition” as “a continuous process situated in the nothingness of the present and codified by thinkers who fix upon this aspect or that, in accord with their needs or preoccupations” (Glassie 1995: 395) encapsulates the spirit of the present study. His warning that another definition of “tradition” may turn into a “monument to the worries of our unmemorable era” is balanced by his suggestion of “widening [the definition of tradition] into an embrace of the many ways people convert the old into the new” (ibid.).
