The Sonorous Spectacle

Abstract

The Sonorous Spectacle World Music Performance Practices as Discourse aims to situate contemporary world music performance practice as a sonorous spectacle. It does so in order to shed light on the power relations involved in and the discursive nature of musical performance within world music and to explore the various idiosyncrasies of the category. It will thereby attempt to understand musical performance within the world music festival space. Herein questions are posed about the framing practices of the world music festival space and the different music-making practices such as steelpan, calypso, rumba, and soukous that were staged at the various festivals attended for this research. The issue of Othering, which has been a point of contention from the inception of world music’s development, remains the springboard of this research project. The overarching question that is considered here is that of the relation between and interaction of the self and other. The research intends to think about this in broad post-colonial terms and in the way the notion of self/other is embedded in academic discourse on world music, constituted by its literary history and methodological approach. I conceive of world music performance practice as the techniques, methods and framing practices, which are used in the construction of world music festival stages. In being critical of the above processes, the concept of the spectacle provides an ideal platform from which to explore the mechanisms involved in relations of power. To construct a model for understanding the interconnected nature of power relations, Othering, practices of framing, the production and acquisition of knowledge and musical performance, this work draws strongly from Guy Debord and his concept of the spectacle – the idea that society is mediated by representations and images, thereby separating individuals from each other. I will also draw from Michel Foucault and his concept of discourse – the idea that discourse is always connected to power relations and knowledge. Equipped with these conceptual tools for the analysis of framing practices, attention will be granted to how some discourses and representations have embodied, shaped and created meaning systems within contemporary world music performance practice, how they have gained the status and dominate how both world music and its performance practice are defined and organized. In this, it remains that alternative discourses are unheeded and circumvented, yet potentially they present sites where hegemonic practices may be discerned, questioned, disputed, denounced and withstood. Turning to the festival space the project asks how notions discussed academically take form sonically within the world music festival space and how we might be able to think through these notions with music.