Music Glocalization: Heritage and Innovation in a Digital Age ed. by David Hebert and Mikolaj Rykowski

Abstract

Reviewed by: Music Glocalization: Heritage and Innovation in a Digital Age ed. by David Hebert and Mikolaj Rykowski Siel Agugliaro Music Glocalization: Heritage and Innovation in a Digital Age. Edited by David Hebert and Mikolaj Rykowski. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018. [xlviii, 383 p. ISBN 9781527503939 (hardcover), £64.99.] Music examples, illustrations, index. Music has played an important part in the history of the term glocalization. After all, it is Akio Morita, the founder and CEO of Sony, one of the world's largest music and entertainment corporations, who receives credit as the inventor the word in 1990. The company's managers originally intended glocalization to signify the practice of diversifying global marketing schemes to better respond to the different cultures and social conditions existing in specific geographical regions. By 2008, this diversification strategy was so successful that the managers of Sony Music Entertainment [End Page 440] decided to trademark the expression "go glocal" as a business slogan (Wayne Visser, The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business [Chichester: Wiley, 2011], 257–58]. In the same years, glocalization entered scholarly discussion. While its use was initially confined to the field of economics, the social sciences later adopted the concept to better understand how individuals acting and living in local contexts are affected by or respond to global financial or social forces. In spite of its historical origin in the music industry, the concept has found a relatively limited use in music studies, whereas cognate terms such as diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism are more commonly employed to examine the impact of the global circulation of ideas and musical products on specific cultural contexts. Music Glocalization: Heritage and Innovation in a Digital Age, edited by David Hebert and Mikolaj Rykowski, is the first collection on music topics to explicitly deal with the concept of glocalization. The book originates from two conferences held in 2014 and 2015 at the Academy of Music in Poznan, Poland, titled "Music from the Perspective of Globalization." The volume consists of fifteen essays, an introduction, and a conclusion, and is articulated in four sections. The first portion of the book gathers five chapters tackling issues of music and globalization from a theoretical perspective. David G. Hebert's opening essay describes glocalization as no less than "a defining aspect of the contemporary human condition" (p. 6) and examines the multiple roles assigned to music in this context, from its use as an omnipresent soundtrack of our everyday lives to the crucial significance for the music industry of data mining individual musical preferences by online services such as Amazon, Pandora, YouTube, and Spotify. In the following essay, cultural theorist Krzysztof Moraczewski indicates sound-recording technology as the preliminary condition for the current global dissemination of music and as the cause of the growing interaction between Western art music and "previously-oral music cultures" (p. 29) whose sonic products can be archived and preserved in time and space. In his contribution, David Kozel builds upon Jungian psychology to trace a parallel between the archetypal desire of the collective unconscious for unifying myths and the "nullification of differentiation and indigenousness" (p. 46) fostered by the global circulation of music. The two final contributions to the first section connect discourses on globalization with specific examples of composers. In the first, eminent Chopin scholar Mieczysław Tomaszewski considers the influence of Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian cultural heritage on the music of five nineteenth-century Polish composers (Staniszław Moniuszko, Juliusz Zarębski, Mieczysław Karłowicz, Ignace Jan Paderewski, and Karol Szymanowski) who were born and raised within the so-called Polish Kresy, a territory in Eastern Europe that was once part of the Polish state. In the second, Victor Nefkens draws upon philosophers Alain Badiou and Gianni Vattimo to "reframe" Richard Wagner's Gesamkunstwerk as an antitotalitarian aesthetic device, in opposition to Theodor W. Adorno's notorious conceptualization of Wagnerian music drama (and of leitmotifs in particular) as a numbing technique that, like modern advertising jingles, is designed to impair the audience's critical thought. The second group of essays focuses on four contemporary composers to consider the different strategies they have adopted to assert their...