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This chapter focuses on one of the most fundamental sociocultural determinants of creative activities: ideology. Drawing from ethnomusicological ethnographic research, it examines differing cultural belief systems, values, and attitudes that may restrict, inhibit, encourage, or liberate musical creativity. It presents six case studies that demonstrate widely varying beliefs and conventions concerning musical creativity. They are: Venda traditional music from South Africa; pre-1970s Suya ceremonial music from Mato Grosso, Brazil; Western Classical and Romantic art music as studied and performed in Western Europe and North America in the late 20th century; American post-revival folk music; Finnish contemporary folk music; and festival music of the Aymara-speaking indigenous people from Conima, Peru.

This chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the musical history of the Sibe people in Xinjiang, China. It provides evidence to show that in spite of their reputation as a people who have kept themselves aloof and kept their ancient traditions alive, Sibe culture in general and music culture in particular is distinguished by a high degree of syncretism and rapid change. The chapter also argues that though the contexts of music and the media through which it is disseminated are changing rapidly and radically, certain underlying themes in the discussion of music remain constant as modernity takes root in the region.

This introductory chapter discusses the development of music and Islam in Indonesia. Music has played a central role in religious ritual in historic Indonesia and was often used as a vehicle to empower rulers and to spread knowledge and ideology. Islam has been an inspiration for music associated with courtly arts, folk music, and popular music for centuries, but there has been a marked increase in popularity of Islam-inspired forms of various sorts in the 21st century. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter first explores the motivations behind the creation of class as self-authorised sites of popular music heritage — those created and curated by citizen and activist archivists that are devoted to the archiving, preservation, and sharing of popular music heritage. It then turns to the use of social media platforms and the communities of interest that form online and who take a ‘Doing-It-Together’ approach to harvesting vast amounts of popular music materials and memories. Such platforms offer the opportunity or the celebration and sharing of obscure or niche music cultures. However, they also pose issues for their creators and those who may have an interest in participating or studying them. The loss of materials in the rapid ‘churn’; the lack of search, navigation, and retrieval functionality; the potential of technologies becoming redundant; and founders, owners, and administrators losing interest in their sites, all resulting in the loss of substantial numbers of musical memories, are just some of the issues that need to be addressed.

This chapter argues that pressure to fit in was an important impetus for the rightward turn in country music. Consumers, sponsors, and musical producers strived in the mid- to late 1950s to rehabilitate local country music's hayseed image and disassociate the genre from the Depression-era anti-Okie campaign and its lingering stigma by downplaying working-class and Okie identity, discouraging liberal-populist political dissent and stressing how elements of the music culture could convey social status. While this muzzled some performers, it also provided room for a small group of wealthy, well-connected performers—especially some of the 1930s cinematic singing cowboys—to come to the forefront and present themselves as antielitist spokesmen for a new, conservative cultural populism.

This chapter examines several theoretical perspectives that may be useful in framing curricular approaches to the study of world music pedagogy in local music cultures. These theoretical frameworks were used as a guide to conceptualize three case studies in different local communities in Quebec, Canada. Data from the case studies are used to exemplify the theoretical frameworks. One of the objectives of the case studies was to describe the phenomenon of secondary music students using the tools of inquiry of ethnographers (participant observation, interviewing, and transcribing) to construct and represent their understanding of a local traditional music culture including concepts, beliefs, and values embedded in musical/cultural practices. While theoretical frameworks are helpful in guiding the work of music educators, empirical evidence from the field is needed to validate theoretical claims, as well as exemplify how these claims might be translated into practice.

This chapter outlines a dynamic interactionism used to problematise structuralism as a framework for understanding music cultures and media, with reference to archival research. The archive in question is the Mass-Observation Archive, named after the social research organisation that generated its ethnographic material. The chapter interprets the findings of Mass-Observers located in north-west England who observed youth music and dance practices during the pre-war and intra-war years (1936–49). These practices and the various contexts in which they were enacted (ballrooms, dance schools, living rooms) are seen to resonate in particular with ideas about the ‘carnivalesque’ and everyday consumer tactics that escape the influence of producers. It is argued that the notion of what might be termed ‘promenade performances’ of demonstration and display afforded by varying levels of involvement and competence in dancing practices illustrates the significance of interactive processes of cultural exchange — or cultural transmission — scarcely evident in many contemporary youth cultural accounts.

This chapter ties together the theories and research on music and youth cultures. It advocates a situational interactionist model for the study of everyday youth music cultures and media that conceptualises contexts, practices, involvement and accessibility in terms which support previous theoretical propositions and fieldwork/archival analyses. This model will then be applied to a more thorough examination of two central themes to have emerged in the course of this study: intergenerational narratives and localised performances.

The history of KWKH demonstrates the potency of the use of radio signals for communication from a regional to a national audience. It started from local radio. This chapter looks at the effects of World War II on the industry wherein early radio created new opportunities for isolated theaters of music and culture. It also opened contexts of exchange for business, ides, and, music. Over time, radio's potency resulted in the creation of a hybridized music culture. Though the pioneer developers of radio technology envisioned radio not as just entertainment, after a few years, radio took over the phonograph in its primacy in American media. KWKH's formation in the mid-1920s provided the gateway for the emergence of independent radio.

Grounded in the research and promising practices literature, chapter 5 discusses concepts and skills, pedagogies, and technologies related to human response to music. All people respond to music in a variety of ways. Music educators strive to develop students’ abilities to listen to and describe music, analyze and evaluate it, understand its historical and cultural contexts, and appreciate its relationships to other disciplines, including other art forms. Numerous technological tools are capable of supporting student learning in these aspects of music. They may also provide a means to respond to musical stimuli. By aligning musical outcomes related to responding to music with appropriate pedagogies and supporting technologies, music educators can assist students in their continuing development of knowledge and skills essential for meaningful, lifelong involvement with music.

This chapter reviews the craze on Lady Gaga which accompanied the release and reception of ‘Telephone’. It is indicated that such phenomena might jump-start critical interest in music video as an important form of contemporary popular culture. The distinction between the video as a promotional tool for the song and the song proper is increasingly giving way. ‘Telephone’ presents a particularly fascinating perspective on the relationship between the internet, digital music culture and contemporary patterns of music video production, distribution and consumption. It also offers a deliberately ambiguous and playfully perverse image of femininity that defies normative conceptions of female sexuality. For contemporary feminism, and theorists of popular culture more generally, it perhaps matters less if Lady Gaga turns out to be more ‘material girl’ than ‘postfeminist icon’ in the long run than that the debate occasioned by her videos finds a path from the blog to the academy.

This chapter discusses the electronic dance music culture (EDMC)—clubs, festivals and the like—in relation to religiosity. Studies suggest that the collective alterations of consciousness happening in EDMCs such as moral panics and hysteria are similar to the alterations of consciousness expressed by Christian fundamentalists during an intense spiritual revival. In addition, sociologist Paul Heelas says that the contemporary studies about EDMC exemplify the shift from the “revolutionary” to subjective or “expressive life,” in which participants that are typically strangers to one another may experience a spontaneous “flash of mutual understanding on an existential level, and a ‘gut’ understanding of synchronicity.” This empathetic sociality reveals a compulsion consistent with the “neotribes” identified by sociologist Michel Maffesoli.

Fusing sample-based literature and scene-centered discussion, this chapter explores sampling in the context of the industry logics that underpin scene formation. Based on a decade of ethnographic research in the Sydney club scene, it situates the growth of electronic dance music (EDM) culture in a framework of global dance music. The central argument is that the city’s dance music industry has become increasingly international in outlook through sampling the content of overseas scenes and through the technologies that have eroded previously existing scene boundaries. In the same way that many dance music tracks sample and mash the sounds of other sources, the chapter demonstrates how contemporary EDM scenes sample and select from the content of a global circuit of EDM culture. It discusses the relationship of Sydney to other international scenes, making points about conventional notions of center and periphery and illustrating the global flow of cultural objects.

This concluding chapter presents some hypotheses and conclusions about Bhojpuri diasporic dynamics, broader implications for diaspora studies in general, the relation of music genres like tassa to Afrocreole culture, and the implications of this relationship for our understanding of the phenomenon of Caribbean creolization. It suggests that Indo-Caribbean culture, including music culture, can be seen as an ongoing dialectic product of three primary cultural realms—the transplanted but deeply local Bhojpuri little tradition, the imported North Indian great traditions (whether of visiting godmen or Bollywood blockbusters), and Afrocreole culture. The relation between the local Bhojpuri little tradition and the imported Indian great traditions is complex and in some ways competitive. While some cultural activists do lament the hegemony of imported filmsong over local music, others seem to feel that both Bhojpuri traditional songs and Bollywood fare can comfortably coexist.

For the last one hundred years, the dominant music culture in Korea has been Western. Nonetheless, kugak, traditional Korean music, stands for “Korea” in tourist brochures and on countless Internet sites, in historical films and TV dramas, and in the great majority of academic articles and books by musicologists and ethnomusicologists. This chapter explores how promoters and performers of a new genre, kugak fusion, are attempting to commodify kugak for new audiences, to make kugak more commercial, and to ensure that kugak remains a part of the local music industry. “Kugak fusion” is a new term that refers to music performed by a young generation of musicians that has porous boundaries and, insofar as it features musicians trained in kugak, might be considered as traditional music made modern. Unlike in world music elsewhere, the fusion in kugak fusion is not a mix of indigenous and foreign but a mix of Korean and Korean. It appropriates, for Korean musical consumption, elements of Western music styles present in Korea, be they jazz, classical, or pop, coupling these to elements of kugak.

This chapter discusses two distinct traditional entities in Indo-Caribbean music culture—the antiphonal folksong genre called chowtal and the dantāl, a common metallophone—which have flourished in the diaspora. In fact, they have become considerably more widespread, on a per capita basis, than their counterparts in North India. In the process, they illustrate how the neotraditional stratum of the international Bhojpuri diaspora—including both the Caribbean and Fiji—can constitute an entity that shares features that, despite being of traditional Indian origin, nevertheless are distinct from the Bhojpuri ancestral culture. These phenomena illustrate how, in this sense, neotraditional Bhojpuri diasporic music culture is best seen not as a microcosm of its nineteenth-century Bhojpuri-region ancestor, but as an entity with its own distinctive features, in which inherited features may assume trajectories quite distinct from their North Indian counterparts.

Given that approaches toward the study of New Spanish music culture have changed considerably since the 1930s (when Gabriel Saldívar’s book Historia de la música en México first appeared), it seemed appropriate to get a historiographic glimpse of literature pertinent to this field. While some of the scholarship addressed in this chapter does not deal necessarily with New Spain, it is still worth mentioning because its view of colonial music history resonates with narratives that have focused on this area. The chapter closes by addressing how the present book contributes to recent work in the field of colonial music studies, with a particular emphasis on New Spain.