THE MUSIC OF THE OTHER

New Challenges for Ethnomusicology in a Global Age

Laurent Aubert
Foreword by Anthony Seeger

We are surrounded by new musical encounters today as never before, and the experience of musics from elsewhere is progressively affecting all arenas of the human conscience. Yet why is it that Western listeners expect a certain cultural and ethnic 'authenticity' or 'otherness' from visiting artists in world music? The great flood of world musics and of their agents into our most immediate cultural environment is not a simple matter of expanding global musical exchange. Instead, complex processes are at work, and they are intimately linked to the flows of migrants, the growth of interncontinental tourism, the development of new technologies of communication and to our perceptions both of ourselves and of the new musical others now around us.

Elegantly tracing the dimensions of these new musical encounters, Laurent Aubert considers the impact of world musics on our values, our habits and our cultural practices. His discussions of key questions about our contemporary music culture, highly accessible to the lay reader, widen conventional ethnomusicological perspectives to consider not only the nature of Western society as a 'global village' but also the impact of current Western demands on the future of world musics and of their practitioners.

Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2007, ISBN 978-0-7546-5343-1
96 p. 35 FS + port

"It is really a wonderful work – it seems to me like a work of the same broad appeal and import as Blacking’s How Musical is Man, but calibrated for our own times, now very different from the global musical environment that Blacking wrote about more than thirty years ago" Theodore Levin