Musical Cosmopolitanism, Bodies and Aesthetic Cultures

Abstract

Amid the growing sociological interest in cosmopolitanism, Motti Regev seeks to outline in his contribution the major aspects pertaining to the role of music—and pop-rock music in particular—in the consolidation and materialization of cosmopolitanism. Hence Regev explores several dimensions through which pop-rock music has been a key force in propelling cultural cosmopolitanism, especially at the micro level of bodily practices and everyday life. Pop-rock musical styles and genres, as clusters of sonic idioms and as physical entities, have penetrated urban spaces and individual human bodies all over the world and constitute the aesthetic cultures of cosmopolitanism. Regev’s arguments revolve around the idea of the sonic ‘thingness’ of music, how it turns the cultural body into a cosmopolitan body and its effect on various dimensions of culture. Inspiration and insights in this regard are brought from such areas of research and theory as cultural globalization, sociology and anthropology of the cultural body, as well as so-called ‘thing theory’ (Material Culture Studies, ANT—actant network theory, etc.) in order to propose possible foci for investigating how musical cosmopolitanism comes into being and functions as a cultural reality.