Toward a model for the evaluation of the cultural strength of various musics
The interrelated complexity of the world of musics (cont.)
Visibility: Who knows each music?
Slobin (1993:712) suggests that all musics can be described as having one of the following three levels of visibility.
Local visibility
These musics are known by certain small-scale bounded audiences, and only by them. Boundaries may be a village or valley, or small language group. There is a one to one--or few to one--relationship between ethnic groups and these musics. Examples of local musics are those of language groups throughout the world which have not been adopted by larger groups, such as the Usarufas of Papua New Guinea or the Mono of Zaire.
Regional visibility
Such musics are known in a somewhat larger zone of geographical territory. The linguistic analog at this level is a Language of Wider Communication (LWC). An example of a music of regional visibility was country music in the United States; until recently it was recognized and sung primarily in the South.
Transregional visibility
A music with transregional visibility has "a very high energy which spills across regional boundaries, perhaps even becoming global" (Slobin 1993:9). Examples of this category include US rock music and Islamic religious music, both heard in many countries around the world. The Bulgarian Women's Choir was a state sponsored regional music that became popular in the West and, thereby, entered the category of transregional visibility; it even won a Grammy, "the zenith of visibility in the commercial music world" (Slobin 1993:10).
Transmission: How is each music known?
Musics of the world acquire visibility through a variety of means. Revitalization movements can cause a music with a limited local visibility to be known over a wider region. Commercial interests of the entertainment industry can motivate marketing companies to reach wider audiences by promoting pop music in non-Western countries, or from urban settings to rural. The force of an ideological or political movement can propel certain musics to spread over great distances. Perhaps the most important factor in increasing the number of musics in the transregional category today is the proliferation of technology making media for hearing new music available. This media availability can at any moment "push a music forward so that a large number of audiences can make the choice of domesticating it .... All you need is a transmitting medium of great carrying power" (Slobin 1993:9).3
Power relationships: The unequal nature of the world of musics
The interplay of the musics of cultures is seldom an exchange between equals. There is "an unequal distribution of power within societies and this distribution is both formulated and contested on a daily basis by everyone, in both deliberate and intuitive ways" (Slobin 1993:14); this unequal distribution exists between societies as well. When Western pop influenced music becomes accessible to people from local musics, there are strong forces encouraging the exchange to be unidirectional; unless there are unusually strong ideological, ethnic, or financial reasons to counteract it, the result will be practitioners of the local music being drawn without reciprocation to the high-visibility music. The forces may be implicit or explicit. As an example of explicit forces, missionaries in parts of Zaire placed a strict ban "on all forms of native music, musical instruments and rhythmic devices which were feare d would encourage the people in their old practices" (Shaffer 1956:39).
The danger of this unequal distribution of power and forces for change is that it increases the probability of many musics of the world becoming extinct. If the high visibility musics of the world continue to be propelled by financial, ideological, or technical forces into the world of local musics, the result will continue to be the loss of those musics with weaker forces supporting them.
3Appadurai has coined the suffix "escape" to describe the various forces of transmission between and within cultures. The landscapes he suggests are the ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, finanscape, and ideoscape. Back to reference