The KMF has continued to create new meaning based on ever-changing and renewed content. The festival currently features varied categories for performance by participants. The categories draw from African, Western, Oriental, and Islamic vocal, instrumental music and dance, elocution in English, Kiswahili and other African languages, French, German, Arabic and sign language. Within the African category, it is worth noting that Kenya, for instance, has 43 known ethnic communities, all of which present their music in the festival in different classes. Communities from other African countries also have a place at the festival. For Western classical music, there are solo performances for the respective voices, choral performances as well as solo and instrumental music. The expansiveness of the content presented at the KMF requires 12 days of performance for the festival to be complete. The table below shows how the different genres of music are categorized in the festival.

#### *Table 2: KMF classifications*

(KMF Syllabus, 2017)

The table shows how the respective content defines what the categorized participants can perform based on the idiomatic uniqueness. In the same table, the number of participants is a determining factor in how suitable the performances would be rendered, and that is why it is of fundamental consideration. The categories are further split for easier administration and technical facilitation. For instance, African folksongs and dances are further categorized by the respective ethnic communities. The Western and Oriental instruments are categorized by the mode of playing and sound production. Table 3 below shows an example of categorization in English verse speaking for secondary schools to demonstrate how the web of categories in the KMF reveal the diversity and transnationality of the festival over time.

(KMF Syllabus, 2017)

The table shows two major categories (solo and choral) of English verse speaking for secondary schools. Under the solos, different levels of ability stratify the participants. Under the choral section, the themes of the compositions further differentiate the classes. From the table, secondary schools participate in 25 categories in English verse speaking. But then verse speaking is done in Kiswahili, German, French, other African languages and Arabic. Some of the English categories apply to the other languages, but peculiarities exist that may not apply. For example, in Kiswahili there are instances of singing or chanting. Not all levels participate in all the categories above. Nursery schools, for instance, do not participate in special compositions. In replicating the above categories for primary schools, colleges, polytechnics and universities, not all apply to the secondary school ones. Given the particularities, I did a head count of the 2017 edition of the KMF syllabus and found that for each language there is the following number of elocution categories across nursery, primary, secondary schools, colleges, polytechnics and universities:

(KMF Syllabus, 2017)

The above adds up to a total of 308 categories in elocution only. The example of elocution here demonstrates the multiplicity of categories found at the KMF. Such multiplicity is found not just in the number of classes but also in the number of performers. A unique example is the category for the visually impaired and learners with cerebral palsy as revealed in table 3. Elocution in a music festival is attributed to the African philosophy whereby many arts are embedded and performed as one. In this case, they were separated as a form of creating specialty, diversity and nurturing learners

in specific areas of art. Such is also replicated in the curriculum where music is a separate discipline from poetry, which is categorized under literature. It is, however, still called a music festival due to its history and initial objectives. The KMF may end up being referred to as a music and elocution festival over time. A unique revelation of table 3 is the themes of the special compositions in the choral category. Their political, economic and social inclinations are a strategic approach by the festival to involve the learners in current issues, to use the festival as a marketing tool on such issues as well as to assume and/or ascribe corporate social responsibility and community building.

During performance, the festival emphasizes the need for maintaining idiomatic characteristics of the respective cultures from which the performances are drawn. Given the stratification of the performances based on their cultural idioms, the festival adjudicators look out for not only the artistry (creative packaging of musical elements) but also for strict adherence to culture-specific modes of presentation. This is revealed in dance styles, instrumentation, song modes and other performative elements that should ref lect how the respective communities uniquely manifest themselves. In watching the festival one can, therefore, be subjected to a variety of music traditions with dif fering levels of artistry, intensity, sound, color and dance movements among other performative characteristics. Interestingly, not all performers present that which comes from their culture. It is common, for instance, for participants from western Kenya (who are predominantly Luhya) to perform Pokomo music from the coastal part of Kenya. This is done as a form of intercultural sharing, interaction, appreciation and serves to educate learners about the country's cultural diversity. It is also an ef fort to complement classroom teaching about the music cultures of Kenya, thus serving as an alternative approach to education.

Regardless of whether a person is performing music from her or his community of origin or not, the evaluation of performances at the KMF is largely based on how the participants adhere to the categorization guideline, and maintain idiomatic relevance, artistic novelty as well as innovativeness. I sampled comments from selected adjudicators to establish what they considered in their judgement. With specific reference to folk songs, the following were common issues that they looked out for:

To achieve evaluative skills, competence and relevance, selected practicing musicians and poets gather at an annual week-long conference in which they are trained. Referred to as adjudicators at the KMF, these trained musicians and poets watch and listen to performances, at the end of which they critique, award marks and rank the participants. Depending on standards, performances are usually marked out of 100 per cent, and my experience shows that low ranking performances score no less than 78 per cent and the highest (very good) up to 95 per cent at the national level. At lower levels, it is common for the participants to be scored lower on account of insufficient preparedness and lesser competition. The result of their work is presented first with a short oral demonstration concerning how their performances were evaluated, followed by an announcement of marks awarded and the respective positions of the participants. An important question is what impact such exposure has on the performers and ultimately on the future of the festival's creative process.

It has been observed that in a number of instances the idiomatic characteristics of selected communities are borrowed from others. Given the demands of the festival, it is possible that such borrowing is necessitated by the need to make the performances more captivating for the participating groups to win. It is possible that due to a lack of creative ideas, some performers simply borrow from others, oblivious to the idiomatic differences. A captivating category at the KMF, for instance, is the "adaptation of popular music" for choral performances. This music features dance styles drawn from pop music performances. Given its captivating nature, such dance styles are gradually finding their way into folk music, which traditionally shows different styles of performance that are idiomatically unique to the respective cultures. Such stylistic borrowing makes it easy for adjudicators to evaluate, as cultural non-conformity renders participants irrelevant. In

those instances where a large number of the participants show non-conformity, adjudicators are relegated to looking more so at performative elements than idiomatic and cultural relevance. This situation indicates a gradual shift of idiomatic expression that with time may signify further changes in musical expression.

Another inf luence has been that of Western music on folk music. It is common for a "folk song" to be presented in form of a medley, where short "songlets" are joined to form a complete song. Most of the groups typically end with the song that they started with, an indicator of the sonata inf luence. Others make use of a main song from which they depart and return to in different instances, indicating a borrowing from theme and variation of Western classical music. While this is folk music supposedly unique to Kenyan communities, there is remarkable evidence of form and structure from other parts of the world.

With regard to choral music, conducting is a norm for Western classical music, and it is practiced at the KMF, too. But what happens when music that depicts traditional idioms of Kenya is performed with the aid of a conductor? The conducting draws more than hand movement to show the choir how pieces are performed, but also incorporates movement in the form of dance. Perhaps such inf luence is a result of the natural process of African music performance, where song and dance are complementary. It could, therefore, be difficult for a conductor to stand still and only wave her or his hands when the music is tempting enough for dance to be elicited. The conducting experienced in some instances at the KMF may, therefore, be regarded as a form "director participation" not conducting as it is within the Western classical domain. Directing in this case gives it a more holistic dimension where the leader makes use of gestures and performative mannerisms beyond the conducting box, fully participating in the performance yet not directing it.

The foregoing examples demonstrate the effects of cultural exchange as experienced at the KMF. It can be argued that it is possible to identify characteristics of the respective music cultures and/or practices in a given performance at the KMF. But it is also true that the cultural exchange coupled with consistent practice has resulted in a musical character that is uniquely KMF and/or Kenyan. A remarkable performance technique that can ably qualify the foregoing submission is realized in the "adaptation and arrangement of pop music", where the singers vocalize the instrumental timbres. This is distinctively a KMF product that arguably has been perfected in Kenya, courtesy of the creativity, culture and practice within the KMF space.

#### **KMF community**

This paper regards members of the KMF community as the people who in whatever way have contributed to writing the success story of the festival. Historically, mainstream communities are based on common heritage, language, culture and territorial placement. In this case, however, the KMF is considered a community based on a shared artistic commodity and processes in musical arts, an opinion that is shared by Shelemay, who believes that "shared habits bind people into social groups according to specific aspects of the self (gender, class, age, occupation, interests)." (2011: 355) This being a community, different members are charged with varied responsibilities. The conscious or unconscious isolation of any of the members of this community would lead to a malfunction of the whole.

As shown in the historical description above, the KMF was started by the British settlers who formed an important part of the community not just as players but as initiators of the concept, the culture they cultivated (based on their home culture) and the inf luence they have had on the subsequent members of the KMF. At its early stages, an important player in the KMF was Graham Hyslop (1910-1978), the then officer in charge of music and drama in the Kenya colony. Hyslop in many ways defined how performances were and are carried out to date. The officers (mainly the executive secretary) who came in after him maintained, built on and improved the technical and administrative structures that he left behind.

The other members include the teachers who train and direct participants during the performances. They are also drawn from all parts of Kenya as well as from outside. The performers include nursery and primary school pupils, secondary schools, colleges and university students, as well as teachers' and lecturers' clubs. The community extends to adjudicators, officials from the Ministry of Education and the president of Kenya, being the patron of the festival. Many other interested groups occasionally join the KMF community by partnering and sponsoring the festival, hence diversifying the community.

Currently, the KMF is held annually in a different region of Kenya on a rotational basis. An institution in one of the cities in the chosen region is then charged with the responsibility of hosting the festival. It can be argued that the hosting institutions and environments momentarily become part of the KMF community. This is based on the fact that at the given point, the hosting community consumes KMF products, just as the KMF consumes their products. Such exchange creates a sense of connection, shared values and communion. It is possible that after the festival, the hosting communities' knowledge about the KMF brings them closer together, making it easier to relate with and increasing appreciation of what it entails. Chances of making lasting community ties cannot be dispelled.

An interesting feature of this community is how participants are programmed to perform. The dramaturgy of the KMF is designed so that the nursery schools are the first. They are then followed by primary schools, who perform alongside teacher training colleges (TTC). The middle days of the festival are dedicated to polytechnics and diploma colleges. The last set of performers are usually secondary schools who perform alongside universities and university colleges. The reasoning behind this dramaturgy is that TTCs train primary school teachers. Performing at the same time as primary schools provide an opportunity for the student teachers to interact with their prospective learners in advance. It is an early opportunity to understand the primary school pupils with regards to performance. The same is true for universities which train teachers for secondary schools.

Another reason is that universities and secondary schools show higher levels of performance given their level of artistic maturity and availability of resources. Them coming last gives the festival a chance to end on a climax. Such a climax is not only achieved by the performers but also by the type of music presented. It is common, for instance, that arrangements of pop music categories are presented last because of their competitive and entertaining nature. At the end of the festival, selected exemplary performances from all levels come together to present a finalist concert that is non-competitive. From the gala concert, a few of the more exemplary performances that are also based on culture-idiomatic diversity are selected for presentation to the president of Republic of Kenya, who is the patron of the festival. The last two instances show how the festival brings unity. After all the competitions in separate instances, performers come together to form a team that puts on a common non-competitive concert. The festival fosters unity in diversity.

Members of the KMF community described above show varied ages, levels of musical ability and experience, different cultural backgrounds as well as diverse personal and professional affiliations. Such a complex web of community members not only positions KMF as a transnational space based on diversity but exemplifies the miscellaneous impacts on the practice and creative process of the festival as well as the resulting musical culture. The fact is that music as the central commodity, process and activity plays an important role in identity and community formation, an opinion shared by Turino who states that:

music, dance, festivals, and other public expressive cultural practices are a primary way that people articulate the collective identities that are fundamental to forming and sustaining social groups, which are, in turn, basic to survival (2008: 95).

#### **Integrated discourse**

Drawing from the content of the KMF, it is evident that a wide range of music is presented at the festival, the themes of which are equally diverse. Seemingly, the performance of folk, art, dance and instrumental music focuses on reproducing what was composed several years back. It can be argued that such pieces are chosen for performance due to their technical and artistic relevance and not for what they communicate as such. Re-performance of music from the archive in essence brings the pieces to life and gives them a sense of artistic renewal in the current society. A pertinent concern for this paper is that apart from its artistic endowment, to what extent does the KMF delve into current societal issues? The concern is based on the fact that the festival is education-based and brings together people from diverse cultures, hence the need for discourse beyond artistic presentation.

On mentioning the phrase music festival, one would immediately switch into performance mood, hearing sounds and seeing people in artistic action. It is, however, interesting to note that the Kenya Music Festival communicates more than its musical sound. It is currently a norm that the festival has an overriding theme each year, where performances, speeches, merchandise and all activities of the festival focus on communicating the same. In 2017 for instance, the festival theme was "Enhancing National Unity, Cohesion and

Integration through Kenya Music Festival". It is, therefore, imperative that the different participants not only see the artistic substance of the festival but also their social and corporate responsibility towards better nationhood. It is in the interest of the international community that while international ties are fostered, the peaceful co-existence of people of the respective nations be achieved. KMF ably takes an important position in not only supporting this debate, but being a practical example of unity, cohesion and integration. This is noted in the way participants come together to compete in a friendly environment that is devoid of gender, regional, ethnic, racial or any other form of discrimination. By friendly competition it implies that winning or losing is not a recipe for enmity but rather presents an opportunity for participants to learn from each other, embrace each other's gifts and talents and importantly nurture talent as they build a community of artists.

It has also been observed recently that many persons and institutions partner with KMF with a view to supporting, promoting and sponsoring the festival all while engaging in alternative discourse concerning emerging issues in the society at national and international levels. The partners sponsor certain themes which are repackaged into songs and poems for performance at the festival. At the KMF, these are referred to as special compositions. But what is special about them? The focus of the compositions is to communicate pertinent information, hence the need for strategic thematic packaging and development of the songs/poems, yet not compromising their artistic relevance. What is more, the intention is for the performers themselves to know, internalize and practice what they seek to communicate through the special compositions. This brings a unique dimension of educational philosophy where learners are immersed in art from which they acquire important novel ideas outside of the mainstream classroom scenario. In this case, art and performance may be considered as an alternative or complementary classroom.

Over the years, organizations from the political, human rights, business and social sectors (among others) have been part of such discourses at the KMF. In 2018, for instance, a number of institutions sponsored themes that participants composed and performed (Ministry of Education 2018). Table 3 demonstrated some of the topics that addressed varied current social, economic and political issues. To give them the desired prominence, such topics were performed under special composition categories. Such topical issues are pertinent to the current society not only in Kenya but across the world. By the KMF providing a stage where such issues are presented in an artistic manner, the festival further positions itself not only as a music fete but as a platform for social, political and economic discourse. Art, in this instance, is employed to provide more efficacy to communication given that it reaches out to more people and is communicated by the people who are affected by the issues. Given the affective nature of music, artistic presentation lends the message to the desired recipients with ease and efficacy, hence enhancing the chances of better communication. Whereas such information is meant to correct certain issues in society, it also acts as a form of social control where through art young people learn to uphold certain virtues, hence preventing future negative occurrences.

Until 2005, the festival was held at the Kenyatta International Conference Center (KICC) in Nairobi, an infrastructural identity for the city that serves as a tourist attraction, as well. The center was a strategic site for the festival given that people from different parts of Kenya and the world were able to attend the festival as part of their touristic undertakings. In the process, the KMF became part of the touristic venture at the KICC where the diverse cultures of Kenya were exhibited on this international platform. It can be argued, however, that the international center ended up packaging KMF as a global commodity that would still attract many people even if it was held outside the KICC.

In 2006, the executive committee decided to stage the festival in different parts of Kenya on a rotational basis. Given its already achieved reputation, the festival moved its community away from the KICC, hence developing a new and more integrated community in the process of its mobility. While this may be viewed as a way of promoting local tourism, international tourists are also obliged to visit more parts of Kenya courtesy of KMF. The holding or staging of the music festival in different parts of the country also enables the participants to know their country better as well as to break ethnic nations' borders and tensions, thereby promoting better cohesion. Additionally, the people of the respective parts of Kenya are able to enjoy the music, and they also learn from the themes, especially from the special compositions that are presented in the festival. The KMF may be viewed as a strategic platform for diverse emerging social, political and economic discourse in the world.

# **The impact of the transnational space on creativity and diversity of music**

The KMF is a unique space that has had a far-reaching impact on many aspects of Kenyan society. It is for instance notable that the nation is comprised of 43 known ethnic communities that similarly exhibit distinct musical cultures. Given such diversity, one would be concerned about whether there exists a Kenyan choral identity. As previously discussed, the presentation of the diverse music of Kenya has facilitated a substantial borrowing from the respective cultures. It can, therefore, be argued that while each musical culture that is presented at the KMF has its own uniqueness based on idiomatic particularities, there are certain aspects of performance that can be clearly regarded as born out of the festival, over time constructing a Kenyan choral identity. In terms of staging folk songs, the performers arrange themselves in a semicircle of two lines, which is a complete departure from the traditional formations. Related to the folk songs are the dances, which are always started off stage. In the process of the performance, they make geometrical patterns as well as representations of letters of the alphabet. While this is regarded as a form of variation for the sake of artistry, it can also be a means for complementing and incorporating other areas of learning in performance, hence forming a transdisciplinary approach to education.

Western classical music is a genre that was the first on stage at the KMF and has existed at the festival for a long time. Currently, it continues to grow as more categories of classical music continue to be introduced into the festival. The music practiced at the KMF is based on theories that many choral directors have read in books. Few had the opportunity to interact with the early British musicians who showed them how such music should be performed. The current group of musicians, though, includes a fair share who studied in Europe or America and therefore have first-hand experience of classical music performance practices. Perhaps technology has equally been a good tiding for the KMF, given that many can now watch via the internet how classical music is practiced. It is, however, common knowledge that classical music is not as well internalized as the folk music of Kenya, which most musicians have grown up with.

To this end, the practice of classical music at the KMF has also been subject to substantial inf luence from the folk practices of Kenyan music. In terms of vocal rendition, it is common to hear choirs with broadened voices

and gliding approaches. As pertains conducting, the inf luence of African rhythm has led to an observable emphasis on the individual details of the rhythmic elements. A number of directors conduct while tapping their feet or snapping their fingers. Where the music calls for dance movement, the conductors unconsciously incorporate the entire torso movement. In a number of cases, conductors also sing along with the choir, perhaps alluding to the communal nature of African music. Whereas conducting has a specific character in the Western classical tradition, its employment at the KMF has experienced a shift that to a large extent is identifiable as a Kenyan choral identity.

Further inf luence is observed where musicians adapt Kenyan folk melodies, which they re-arrange in a Western classical style in terms of melodic, rhythmic and thematic development as well as the entire form and structure. The most common structure that was mainly propagated by the early British musicians is the Sonata form, which is notable not only in arrangements but also in performances of folk songs. Notably, "songlets" are joined in a medley to form one song, where the starting piece will also be employed as the ending. Apart from rearranging folk melodies, KMF musicians also compose in traditional Kenyan rhythmic idioms, albeit based on Western classical techniques. The most developed arrangements are the adaptations of pop music, where the singers vocalize the instrumental sections of the music. Such compositions and arrangements have over time distinctively come to achieve a character that in a number of ways borrows from Western classical music but then completely depart from it, especially when it comes to performance. African dance, instrumentation, ornaments, dramatization, among other visual and performing arts, are extensively employed in the execution of such songs. To this end, performance on stage shows a marked departure from the classical tradition, giving it a face that is distinctively Kenyan.

The foregoing discussions reveal how the KMF, through cultural interaction, has negotiated a Kenyan choral identity that is evident in dance, folk music and art music. The identities have been realized in the internal components and structure of the music, most markedly in terms of its performativity. It can be argued that perhaps the presentational aspects have mainly been shaped due to the traditional Kenyan music inf luence, which is primarily performative. It is possible to identify the specific idiomatic characteristics of the cultures from which they have been borrowed. It can, however, be presumed that the way the respective idioms have been combined has been

and is an ongoing process that is identifiable as Kenyan. The KMF has, therefore, fostered an identity construction for Kenyan choral music by localizing Western music while at the same time "exoticizing" local music.

#### **Reflections**

The Kenya Music Festival as a transnational space has been nurtured by three important concepts: culture, creativity and practice. The KMF model was born from a British culture but later incorporated Kenyan musical cultures as a means of making the festival more inclusive. Over time, musical representations from different cultures have defined the content of this festival. Given its interactive nature, the practice of the respective music at the KMF has led to the creation of newer cultures which share identifiable characteristics with their mother cultures yet are unique on their own. This paper views the KMF as a pot that is bringing together cultures due to the creativity and practices employed at the festival.

The day-to-day running of the festival has also gradually been transformed into a culture in and of itself. In terms of schedule, the festival is well programmed in the activities of the Ministry of Education, where one can anticipate it at specific times. The way music is performed at the KMF has a definite mannerism where the entire fete starts with an assembly for the performance of the Kenyan national anthem, opening prayers and a briefing about the program of the day. On stage, the participants start by introducing their work before their performances. A typical introduction is: "honorable adjudicators, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. On stage is school A ready to present…". This has been practiced so much over time that one is able anticipate what the participants will say. It is also common for adjudicators to start their public evaluation speeches by thanking the participants, highlighting positive aspects of the performance before moving onto the negative ones and the ratings. The running of the festival has thus become a culture with a defined liturgy due to continued practice.

The interactive nature of the festival has also had an impact on the creativity it exhibits. This has been realized in the way participants follow advice from the adjudicators, such that subsequent performances largely put into practice that what they have been advised. The participants keenly watch each other's performances so that they can try to imitate the winning group.

Such imitation has led to similarity in the way performances are done at the festival but has also improved on the creativity, thus leading to higher standards. It is also noted that music teachers play a big role in the innovation of newer ideas in the performances at the KMF. The interaction of cultures has equally contributed to the borrowing of ideas that has given rise to hybrid music performances.

The KMF can be viewed as a commodity and a process. Culture, practice and creativity are concepts that have over time strategically nurtured and positioned the KMF as a transnational music space. This has been realized in the way cultural integration and interaction have been fostered at the festival. Such interaction has over time created and recreated new cultures within the existing ones. The development of the KMF has largely been based on creative novelty, which when practiced over time has resulted in the emergence of certain musical identities. Importantly, diverse content and creativity have been fused to not only render artistic products but to communicate pertinent information to and within the society. Based on creativity, culture and practice, the transnational space at the KMF has in many ways helped the festival to achieve its artistic objectives as well as other pertinent societal roles and obligations.

#### **Bibliography**

# **"Come and expose yourself to the fantastic music from around the world"1**

Experiencing world music festivals

*Peter Lell*

### **Introduction**

Since the last century and even more for the last decades, the world has increasingly been connected, and people from the most distant places have become neighbors both virtually through the World Wide Web and physically through easier and faster ways of travelling. The worldwide interconnectedness has been termed "globalization", or in a more differentiated form, several "-scapes" have been described. Appadurai distinguishes five of them, including "ethnoscapes", "technoscapes", "financescapes", "mediascapes", and "ideoscapes." (1990: 297-300) Those parameters attempted to more adequately describe today's complex global cultural economies, their f luidity and the plurality of possible perspectives to be taken.

In similar ways, the production and consumption of cultural goods has become distributed over distant localities all over the world. Music production is one part of this and, in unique ways, has been changed by global interactions. Reaching far-off audiences, allowing global f lows of musical ideas and styles and providing an opportunity for musicians as well as audiences to "attend" distant places in the world, the distinction between the global and local dimension has been severely blurred. A remarkably interesting phenomenon in this regard is the music festival. Music festivals can be described as places offering "intense and concentrated interaction" (Chalcraft/ Magaudda 2005: 173) between people from different places sharing a local

<sup>1</sup> This is a quote from Derek, one of my interviewees at WOMAD.

experience. At music festivals, f lows of people from different regions, nations and continents come together at a locally situated, limited space. For that, music festivals have to be perceived not only as local but simultaneously as global events, aiming for potential audiences throughout the world.

A particular type of music festival will be discussed here: world music festivals. World music festivals operate on a global as well as a local dimension and have a special connection to this dichotomy. Music festivals, or rather fairs presenting the music of the world, can be dated back to colonial world's fairs such as the famous exhibition in 1889 in Paris, where the composer Claude Debussy for the first time heard Javanese gamelan music. Since the first world exhibition in London in 1851, cultural and artistic aspects have become more and more important, with competitive performances of industry sectors and trade co-operations being the primary reasons behind this growing importance. Transgressing nations and borders, from a certain perspective those exhibitions could be seen as the ancestors of world music festivals. Similarly, one of the first music gatherings explicitly presenting music of different ethnic groups was the North American "folk song and handicraft festivals" (Näumann 2017: 206) in the early 20th century. More direct predecessors of world music festivals can be seen in the folk and rock music festivals of the 1960s and 1970s, especially gaining popularity in the Anglophone space (Ibid: 206-207).

World music festivals as such cannot be found before the term "world music" was coined as a commercial music genre in 1987. Nevertheless, the first world music festival can be identified as WOMAD (The World of Music and Dance) in 1982. However, it generally remains difficult to pin down "world music" festivals as they do not all explicitly have the term in their name or description. Still, it is possible to identify festivals presenting artists mostly found in the world music genre or addressing a similar audience. For instance, the journal *Songlines*, which is all about music from the world music genre, provides a yearly guide to international festivals and might be used as an indicator for world music festivals. From 1982 onwards, world music festivals have grown and spread significantly around the globe in different sizes, with different musical foci, ways of presentation and intended audiences. Bringing together global musicians and local as well as global audiences, they constitute transnational spaces of encounter. Creating a temporal, artificial space where the world seemingly shrinks down to a local

festival site, they offer possibilities for interaction and exchange and furthermore shape the idea of something perceived as "world music".

Despite their significance in shaping and promoting the genre as well as their economic importance within it (Laing 2009), world music festivals have not yet been researched extensively. Furthermore, most of those referring to world music festivals are not based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the festivals themselves. This central perspective is what I am approaching in this work. The main question of this article is: How is world music experienced at world music festivals? For that, two case studies have been selected and ethnographic fieldwork has been conducted. The first case study is WO-MAD at Charlton Park, United Kingdom, and the second, the Africa Festival in Würzburg, Germany.

The structure of the article will be as follows: Firstly, an insight into the term "world music" and literature and ideas about it, including two narratives of world music, will be presented. Following that, the methodology of the ethnographic fieldwork will be outlined, and the two festivals as well as the ideas of world music they communicate will be delineated. Subsequently, five parameters of world music are outlined which represent the main part of this article and have been termed "signifiers of world music". Finally, the results will be interpreted combining theoretical as well as practical outcomes before research outlooks are enumerated.

#### **What is world music?**

Different perspectives can be taken on this question. Disjoining the term into "world" and "music", there seems to be few to no extra information to be gleaned by combining them, as the term "music" does not explicitly include or exclude any geographical restriction, which the addition of the term "world" would adjust. In practice, however, the term "music" has largely been used with regards to a particular understanding dependent on either the historical time or the context. Similarly, the term "world music" has a history of different meanings spanning from the early 20th century until today. Since the early academic discipline comparative musicology emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, the music of the world was equated with any music that was non-Western or not from the classical European tradition, and the research about this music was conducted with the idea of affirming

the superiority of the West (Rice 2014: 17). Within the ethnomusicology of the 1960s, the music of the world, though still merely called "world music", has been approached with more careful views, including the idea of music as every "humanly organized sound." (Blacking 1973: 3)

Is world music today simply referring to all the music the world has to offer? Not precisely. And it was for that reason that ethnomusicology had its differences with the term "world music" itself, though it does usefully describe the area of study. Particularly since 1987, there have been strong connotations which are anything but inclusive for all kinds of music. This is closely tied to the formation of the genre market of "world music" initiated by a number of record labels meeting in London in 1987 and creating "world music" as a genre category.<sup>2</sup> From that point on, "world music" or rather "World Music" was disseminated widely as a category for music formerly put in the "roots", "traditional", "ethnic", or "international" (Ibid) bin at record stores and which then gained a huge boost in popularity. For music journalists and today's listeners, it is this kind of music that increasingly dominates the idea of world music. While it still is presented as an inclusive music category without reference to any specific music or region, "in practice, [it is] systematically exclusive." (Frith 2007: 307) It favors particular kinds of music, mostly African (Howard 2009: 8) (and within that also very selective) as well as Latin, and ignores others completely, like "Cantopop and karaoke" (Frith 2007: 307) or anything from far East Asia (Taylor 1997: 17). While its origins can be traced in ethnomusicological field recordings, the world music found today in record stores, charts and in playlists of streaming services has little to do with those historical collections. Although the world music category can still include field recordings, in most cases it shares more commonalities with Western popular music in terms of promotion, distribution and, arguably, sound.

Music scholars have written extensively about this seemingly new genre and have been rather suspicious about it. While it generally can be described as the music of "people in different places creating, hearing and using different sounds" (Fairley 2001: 287), this description is not as neutral as it might appear at first sight insofar as it incorporates a particular understanding. The world music genre can be described as a highly sensitive intersection

<sup>2 &</sup>quot;Press Release 01—World Music" (https://frootsmag.com/press-release-01-world-music).

between the actors involved, the musicians, the producers, the labels, the festivals, the audiences and so on.

Throughout musicological literature, two prominent views on world music can be distinguished, attempting to both understand the phenomenon and to value it. Steven Feld differentiates between an "optimistic" and a "pessimistic view." (2000: 151-154; 165-171) Jan Fairley uses the terms "celebratory" and "anxious" (2001: 275) to describe them. Slightly simplified, the optimistic view outlines the possibilities of world music to foster intercultural encounter and exchange between musicians and audiences connected to a hope for cultural and financial equity and musical collaboration (Haynes 2005: 381; Krueger 2011: 298). The pessimistic view sees world music as dependent on the creation and maintenance of "difference" between self and other by outlining the authenticity, cultural and geographical localization, ethnicity or characteristics of the music (Taylor 1997: 19-27; White 2012: 190). Furthermore, this perspective criticizes the commodification of the music and, relatedly, the exploitation of the musicians (Feld 2000: 167). While there are arguments against such a dichotomous view and pleas for more careful analysis of world music production and "the entire set of power relations through which acts get signed, tracks recorded, releases playlisted [sic], concerts booked, and so forth" (Fairley 2001: 275), the discourse barely leaves the dichotomous sphere of either speaking in optimistic terms or in pessimistic outlooks. Timothy Taylor concludes that despite this attempt "to do away with binary oppositions as analytical tools, it is still the case that, ethnographically speaking, many people understand the world through such oppositions and organize their practices and epistemologies around them." (2004: 66)

This is where the contribution of my research comes into play. The majority of the ethnomusicological literature on the genre category world music is not based on ethnographic fieldwork; thus, this crucial perspective is still widely missed. My contribution to the discourse deals with the question of how world music is experienced at the attended festivals. The experiences of the visitors are approached through my interviews with them and my experiences are built up from observation and participation. As a research ground, world music festivals have been chosen for the following reasons: they represent a tangible manifestation and an essential representation of the world music genre bringing together global actors to a locality; they are one of the most profitable sectors of the world music market (Laing 2009: 227); and finally, they provide the possibility to gain insights into how world

music is presented at the festival sites, performed by the musicians as well as experienced by the audience. Despite these factors, they still have not been researched sufficiently.

For parts of the interpretation of my data, I am building on thoughts presented by Antoine Hennion (2005) on the performative nature of cultural practices. He suggests thinking about music listeners not only as passive consumers of objects according to their sociological affiliation but rather as having impactful aspects of "activity" involved in the process of their interaction with music (while he explicitly speaks about "tasting" as well as the "amateur" ([Ibid: 132-133], he addresses the music listener). Hennion highlights the music listener's "capacity to transform sensibilities and create new ones, and not only to reproduce an existing order without acknowledging it." (Ibid: 132) His thoughts bring into focus the music listener's, or in my case the music festival visitor's, active involvement in the experience of the genre world music rather than being a simple consumer of a fixed and definite genre as, for instance, the two described narratives purport.

#### **Two case studies and methodology**

The case studies for this research include WOMAD at Charlton Park, United Kingdom, and the Africa Festival in Würzburg, Germany. How was the selection made? There are numerous festivals presenting world music throughout Europe and the world. During the selection process, the main criteria were the festivals having a heightened reputation among world music festivals, a promising first impression on social media and websites, being geographically within reach and, last but not least, the dates of the festivals fitting into my timeframe. The first choice was made by picking WOMAD Charlton Park, UK, as a festival for the research. It fulfilled the chosen criteria and had preference over other choices simply due to the fact of being one of if not the first world music festival in the world as well as a very successful one. The second choice was made by picking Africa Festival in Würzburg, for relatively simple reasons. It is the festival I had received the most positive feedback about from my contacts, who highlighted its familial atmosphere and its respectable reputation and size.

My choices do not ref lect a representative selection of all world music festivals. There are too many and too different festivals of world music in many countries all over the world. Nevertheless, the choice does ref lect a reasonable sample of particularly interesting festivals: WOMAD as well as the Africa Festival are pioneers of world music festivals and are particularly prestigious ones. Though the Africa Festival is explicitly about African music and not world music, it makes up a large part of what is found in that musical category. Referring to this, systematic analysis still has to be conducted to outline the commonalities as well as the differences of world music festivals and African music festivals, but authors like Keith Howard suggest that "40% or more of world music [would …] always [have] been from Africa or African diaspora." (2009: 5) Furthermore, the festivals do present similar or even the same musicians and utilize similar presentation and marketing approaches. The data for this research was gained through ethnographic fieldwork at the two festivals in 2017, each of which was attended for three full days.

The methods which were mainly utilized were observation, participant observation, participation and interviewing the festival visitors. Observation and participation were mainly used to gain overviews of festival activities and insights into particular places or events. Regularly taken field notes throughout the research allowed subsequent analysis and ref lection upon the experiences. This was complemented by interviewing visitors at the festivals using a semi-structured approach. Though many possible questions were prepared, there was no fixed set of questions, and they were adjusted according to the course of the respective interview. Generally, they addressed the interviewee's idea and understanding of and affiliation with world music and festivals. All in all, 21 in-depth interviews were conducted, eleven of them at the Africa Festival and ten at WOMAD.

#### **WOMAD and The Africa Festival**

Both case studies analyzed two of the oldest festivals for world music, WOM-AD (The World of Music and Dance) being founded in 1982 and the Africa Festival in 1989. WOMAD has received international fame through various offshoots in 26 other countries all over the world. In 2017 (and still), it took place at the spacious park area of the Charlton Park country house in Wiltshire, relatively remote from any larger city. Different from WOMAD, the Africa Festival took place in the heart of the middle-sized German city, Würzburg, and thus was open to spontaneous visitors and day-visitors.

Both festivals offered a large festival area and a camping site allowing many visitors to spend the whole weekend at the festival. Furthermore, they both had large framing programs providing not only music but an immersive experience, which is also typical for the format of festivals. Various spa, relaxation and meditation activities (WOMAD), street parades and a cinema tent (Africa Festival) were accompanied by the obligatory markets, bazaars, food and drink stalls and also party spaces allowing the nights to continue after the concerts had ended. Both festivals had three main musical stages, which were supported by a number of additional stages (WOMAD), musical activities at the camping site (Africa Festival) and the music sounding from the speakers of the market stalls.

A distinguishing feature of WOMAD was the offer of musical workshops for visitors to participate with various musical groups and instrument workshops for Gambian kora, xylophone and gamelan. Furthermore, and especially at WOMAD, music was ubiquitous and f looded the whole festival site, be it from the main stages, the smaller stages, the workshop places or the large number of market, food or coffee trucks. The unique characteristic of the Africa Festival was the camping site being its own little musical world. Groups of visitors informally gathered in communities bringing their instruments, mostly djembe, dunduns, bells, talking drums and koras, and created their own musical experience detached from the festival happenings. Different from most other festivals as well as WOMAD, the visitors had organized their own practical music groups.

Regarding the music and musicians at the main stages, both festivals shared commonalities. A mix of musicians established in the world music genre with newer, younger acts and a few newcomers could be heard. At WOMAD, Orchestra Baobab, Ladysmith Black Mambazo or Afro Celt Sound System have been active for years or even decades and are thus well known to anyone interested in the music genre. They were complemented by newer, younger acts, incorporating more contemporary forms of world music such as Ifriqiyya Electrique, Alsarah & the Nubatones or Trad Attack! Also, newcomers who had not or had barely appeared at festivals or released records could be heard, including the Tanzania Albinism Collective, the Khmer Rouge Survivors or the Zhou Family Band.

Moving on to the Africa Festival, it was a generally similar line-up. However, there was a strong domination of particular regions and countries from Africa. While this year the motto was West Africa, music from Senegal,

South Africa and Mali has also been strongly favored over the years. Since the first festival in 1989, Senegal has been represented by 41 artists, South Africa by 32 artists and Mali by 23 artists, significantly outpacing the other countries of Africa or the African diaspora with the only exception being "Afro-German" artists, with 36 of them having performed at the festival.

It is worth noting that a few particular artists lead the statistics, but some of them are the lonesome representatives of their country. For Senegal, it is Youssou N'Dour with a total of six performances; for Mali, Habib Koité & Bamada have seven, while Salif Keita has six and Fatoumata Diawara has five appearances at the festival. Lokua Kanza was one of the few artists from Congo but has had a record-breaking number of nine performances there, and Manu Dibango from Cameroon has had seven performances at the Africa Festival. These statistics underscore the festival's affiliation with particular regions and/or artists and world music's exclusive praxis compared to the heavily advertised inclusiveness. This year, well-known acts from those particular countries and within the world music scene performed, including Salif Keita, Faada Freddy, Sara Tavares and Fatoumata Diawara.

Similar to WOMAD, there were a number of younger and more hybrid artists such as Tibau Tavares Feat. Pupkulies & Rebecca, Inna Modja and Sista Fa. Also, some lesser known artists within the market could be heard, like Elida Almeida and notably musicians playing West African music on non-amplified drums on the stage for traditional music. They seemed not to hold a position within the world music market but merely gathered for the Africa Festival in that formation and were accompanied by a similarly unknown Senegalese kora player, Saliou Cissoko. All in all, there were minor differences in their approaches, with WOMAD providing a more easily digestible experience and the Africa Festival allowing more open spaces for the visitors themselves. Apart from that, both festivals represented similar musical experiences and attitudes towards something presented as African music and world music.

#### **Five signifiers of world music**

Now I want to have a more detailed look at particular observations and musical acts. While trying to make sense of the data collected at the festival site and in the interviews, it became apparent that there were particular aspects

which were pivotal about the genre of world music as it was experienced at the festivals. Inspired by ethnomusicological literature (Taylor 2004: 66; Guilbault 1996), I have made an attempt to interpret my ethnographic data in a certain way. A number of aspects were found to be especially noteworthy within my ethnographic notes as well as the interview statements. Following that, five parameters were found to be significant for the music to be perceived as "world music". I refer to them as the five "signifiers of world music" and they are by no means exhaustive. After a short introduction to these "signifiers", they will be presented in more detail.

The first signifier addresses musical exoticism, while the second describes the similar need for differences and exceptionalism in visual appearance. The third signifier relates to a visible happiness and devotion of the musicians, and the fourth addresses the idea of music as a universal language. The fifth and last of the signifiers calls attention to the political side of the music, which inherently or explicitly is present for most of world music and musicians.

#### **The first signifier**

The first signifier is related to what the festivals seemed to be trying to communicate at every musical encounter: the unfamiliarity, exoticism and exceptionality of the musical instruments, sounds and rhythms. This seemed often to be related to a particular country, ethnicity, musical tradition, religion or minority—putting it in a simplified way, anything emphasizing a difference between the self (of the audience) and a perceived authentic "other" (of the musicians). At WOMAD, this was particularly apparent at the performance of the Zhou Family Band, which played on noisy and tinny instruments, cymbals, a plain drum, mouth-blown pipes (sheng) and trumpets. Also, King Ayisoba's performance could be strongly connected to this signifier, being played on rather simple and exotic-looking percussion instruments (udu, djembe, talking drum) and a single-stringed lute (kologo) accompanied by a rough singing voice. Another example from WOMAD was Parvathy Baul and Somjit Dasgupta, who used a plain small drum (duggi) and a stringed percussion instrument (ektara) as well as trance-like vocals, which was accompanied by the explicitly announced "ancient instrument", the sursingar.

At the Africa Festival, this signifier was equally represented at most concerts and especially by the drummers on the traditional stage, performing on traditional, acoustic percussion instruments (djembé, dundun, bells, rattles, balafon) and the camping site musicians playing on similar drums as well as on a pleasant-sounding multi-string instrument (kora). In those examples, the signifier of unfamiliar and exotic music, sounds and rhythms was especially apparent, but the insistence on those parameters was inherently existent throughout most performances. From the interviewees' statements, this signifier represents one if not the major aspect of their interest in world music and their attendance of the festivals, as Susanne explained:

I really prefer the drummers, the percussionists. They are simply…I can stay there for hours. […] those [with the] real drums, without any electronic devices. For me, that's it.

Another interviewee, Holger, described it like this:

The rhythms are simply so beautiful. It's not the standard 4/4 time, like we Europeans are used to. But rather things like 12/8 or something like…That is what I really like.

#### **The second signifier**

The second signifier that was found to be pivotal refers to the appearance and look of the musicians. In order to be credible as a world musician, it seemed to be crucial to share the ethnicity associated with the music, such as looking African for "African music", looking Asian for "Asian music" or European for "European music". That could refer to the color of the skin or the hair, the stature of the body, the characteristics of the face or any other recognizable ethnic difference. In short, they had to be "coming from the right country" (Schippers 2010: 48) to be perceived as authentic world musicians. Traditional dress, visual accessories and the behavior on stage were also important.

Here again, the performance of King Ayisoba was noteworthy as the musicians appeared wearing furs and colorful dresses and danced wildly, spreading a sense of authenticity and tradition. Other examples were Junun feat. Shye Ben Ztur and the Rajastan Express, Parvathy Baul and

Somjit Dasgupta or Goat (WOMAD) and Fatoumata Diawara and the musicians at the traditional stage (Africa Festival). While Junun wore dresses of plain white linen, Parvathy Baul and Somjit Dasgupta donned somehow sublime attire and the members of Goat wore elaborate, colorful costumes and masks. While it might have been their usual performance clothing for some members of Junun as well as Parvathy Baul, Goat was explicitly playing with this signifier by exaggerating it. Being a band from Sweden, their clothing, masks and appearance would rather suggest that they were from some "exotic" place—or, if not that, they at least met the desire for this kind of appearance. In my interviews, the appearance of the musicians seemed to be a crucial aspect for the interviewees to perceive the music as world music or simply drew attention to a perceived difference in the musicians' looks from what they were used to in other music genres.

#### **The third signifier**

The third signifier that seemed to be important throughout the festival experience was the devotion and visible happiness of the musicians. In literature, this phenomenon is frequently described in connection to world music, in extreme form referring to a "romanticization and exoticization [… of the musicians] as happy, premodern children." (Taylor 2015: 217) This signifier was central to the overall atmosphere of the festivals being celebratory and positive throughout, and it almost felt like an obligation to adopt that attitude and visibly express it. Apart from the musical aspects, the overall atmosphere was strongly shaped by a holistic perception of the various foods, drinks and market stalls visually shaping the festival site as well as the different f lavors they promised.

Particularly at WOMAD, the atmosphere was ref lected in the audience's colorful dresses, glitter makeup or f lashy accessories as well as the thunderous rounds of applause after concerts, which, however, made the impression of being almost compulsory and forced. All this was intensified by the musicians' expressions. One striking performance ref lecting this was King Gurcharan Mall and the Dhol Blasters (WOMAD). During their performance, which was strongly dominated by celebrative gestures, sounds and screams, they repeatedly attempted to encourage the audience: "All the happy people, put your hands uuup!!" Another example was Fatoumata Diawara's performance (Africa Festival), where her own devotion to the music as well as the relationship with the audience was a frequent topic in her announcements in between the songs:

Are you ok? Are you feeling good? I wanna show you some African step. Are you gonna try the African step? […] Are you feeling the rhythm? Are you feeling [it] like a heartbeat? We get the music inside. […] Now I know that you can feel this music! We gonna try to dance all at the same time, one time... because we are all one.

Furthermore, the performances of the drummers at the traditional stage (Africa Festival) similarly enforced this signifier which people from the audience regularly affirmed to their neighbors. After one performance, a woman next to me told her friend excitedly: "Wild, wild...that was wild!" The drummers were playing very physically on non-amplified drums and were also dancing in front of the audience, whose cheering increased in step with the perceived devotion of the dancers.

In general, various forms of obligatory happiness and devotion could be found in most places and expressions, musical or non-musical, at both festivals. In my interviews, almost all interviewees in one way or another referred to this signifier of the general visible happiness of the musicians or their physical devotion and positivity, which they firmly distinguished from Western pop musicians. For instance, my interviewee Anna was impressed by the drummers at the traditional stage (Africa Festival): "Even though in their countries they are not very well…they show so much energy here. They seem simply so happy also about the smaller things, like the drumming here. There is so much happiness in it, they live it like this."

#### **The fourth signifier**

The fourth signifier that seemed to be ubiquitously present was the idea of music as a universal language, building on the belief that no matter what language is sung or how far the music has travelled, if it is an authentic expression, it would be understood and equally enjoyed. It is a widespread assumption, which also used to be supported by ethnomusicologists, and while they mostly have abandoned or at least adjusted it, in commercial music promotion it is still a very popular narrative (Campbell 1997: 32-39). Peter Gabriel (the founder of WOMAD) precisely describes this signifier which echoes many of my interviewees' descriptions:

Senegalese […] singing […] has an intensely spiritual feeling […] It doesn't matter to me that I don't understand all the words of a song. The voice is such a powerful means of communication, and it's so direct, it can transmit a feeling without having recourse to words (Gabriel cited in Barrett 1996: 242).

While it is difficult to prove or disprove the statement, it seems to be important as a constituting signifier of world music.

This signifier incorporates the paradox that world music is desired as unfamiliar, exotic, unknown music on one hand (the first signifier), but on the other hand, the newly found, exotic music is expected to be comprehensible without too much effort. World music, therefore, should be unfamiliar and new but at the same time not demanding, which again enforces notions of a primitive, predictable "other". Preferably it should be "not too much old style, not too much crossover: what some would call easy listening." (Hutnyk 1998: 403)

 From my ethnographic observation, this was underlined by the fact that the musicians were singing in a large variety of languages which most visitors very likely could not understand but seemed to especially enjoy. My interviewee Holger put it like this:

African music…even though I do not understand it, I like the language very much! When they speak real African, you, or at least I, cannot understand a single word. But it does not bother me, because the music, the rhythms are simply so beautiful.

Regarding the music, it was noteworthy that neither at the Africa Festival nor at WOMAD were there musicians whose music could be called "hard to listen to". Even the most unfamiliar music was made up of relatively pleasant sounds which would quite easily fit into anyone's taste who was socialized in Western countries today.

Only a few musicians were challenging this, for instance Parvathy Baul and Somjit Dasgupta, the Zhou Family Band or the Tanzania Albinism Collective. Notably, those musicians had entertaining aspects in their performances, making it more accessible, with the Zhou Family Band having an

entertaining jester-like show, the Tanzania Albinism Collective telling their stories in between songs or Parvathy Baul dancing in a trance-inducing manner with her knee-long hair waving around her body. Most of the musicians featured at the festivals, however, represented the assumption quite well that music would be universally understandable.

From my interviewees' statements, this signifier was regularly affirmed referring to the border-crossing, transnational abilities of music being understood "anywhere". As often as they described it as unusual and different from pop music, they pointed out how effortless the music was to understand and how groovy, danceable and pleasing it was. Emily put it this way:

In Molly's bar [one of the stages] they had a really good…group, but they weren't pop music! […] Music has to give you something. It has to either...a nice tranquil piece that [is] relaxing or that you want to move [to]. I can't sit and listen to really good beat music...I can't sit! You gotta move, even if you're sitting. You gotta move. So, that's good music. As long as it has a good beat a good sound and it's melodic...put all that together, that's what you look for!

#### **The fifth signifier**

The fifth signifier of world music can be described as the music's involvement with a certain degree of political engagement. This appeared in different ways. Both festivals had political organizations spreading information about world problems or asking for donations such as Amnesty International, Free Tibet initiatives and Médecins Sans Frontières. At both festivals, they were found at fixed places, where several organizations presented themselves. At WOMAD, there was a section at the main festival site for the larger and more professional organizations such as Amnesty International and spots around different places for others like Free Tibet initiatives. At the Africa Festival, those organizations were bundled in a tent ("bamboo hall") with Médecins Sans Frontières represented in front of the tent.

Apart from these formal political associations, there were also other engagements of these kinds. Several musicians held announcements during their performances about problems in their country or general issues, such as Fatoumata Diawara (Africa Festival) about the consequences of war in Africa and in the world or Sista Fa (Africa Festival) about the circumcision

of women in Senegal. Other artists even incorporated that signifier in their identity as musicians, such as the Khmer Rouge Survivors or the Tanzania Albinism Collective (both at WOMAD). Rather than purely musical aspects, it was their background stories that seemed a main reason for them to be able to perform at the world music festival.

For both, it was the successful music producer Ian Brennan who gathered them and formed the bands for the record. In the case of the Khmer Rouge Survivors, it is the history of genocide through the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot's regime in Cambodia that constitutes the narrative of the band's identity. In the case of the Tanzania Albinism Collective, it is the severe persecution of people with albinism in Africa that creates the narrative allowing them to release a record and appear on stage. No matter if it was appropriate in the particular cases, these examples constitute extremes of political affiliation in world music.

While it was an aspect found throughout the festival, it would be a reach to call it a political festival or to refer to world music as politically engaged music. However consistent this signifier was, it was equally superficial and awoke the impression of only seldomly providing significant information or leading to any further engagement. What generally could be seen as desirable for a musical scene, again seemed for world music to be obligatory and represented a constituting genre signifier. From the interview statements, this signifier was seldom directly covered but after further inquiry turned out to be very important for the interviewees' attraction to the world music genre in general and, in particular, the tangible representation of it through the music festival. Derek underlined it in the following way: "Well, we should have campaigns to make people aware of negative things. I think so. There is a refugee tent, I think it is to raise awareness and [it is] very, very important...yeah." Or as Melinda told me: "If people are coming from an oppressive regime, performing...then it's a good thing. People should be made aware of things...rather than just eat the food."

#### **Experiencing world music festivals**

So far, the collected data has been used to delineate experiences of world music from the ethnographer's and the visitors' perspectives. Five "signifiers" have been described which seem to constitute the genre of "world music". In

that sense, the exceptionality and exoticism of instruments, rhythms and musical characteristics were found crucial for the music to be perceived as world music. Similarly, the appearance of the musicians, be it their ethnicity, their dress or their costumes, was found important. Going on, the devoted musical performance and explicit expression of happiness was found to be central in many musicians' performances and the latter, too, for the behavior of the audience. The idea of music being a universal language that could be understood across languages and borders constituted the fourth signifier. Finally, as some examples outlined, a certain political affiliation of the musicians or the festival was found to be important.

Taking these findings and relating them to the two narratives described above could easily lead to the interpretation of the festivals as opportunities to sell the "difference" of musicians, instruments, sounds, appearances and behaviors to a desiring audience. However, this would not adequately suit or depict the experiences. While the signifiers can be seen as constitutional for the genre of world music, the interview statements suggested further ways of interpreting them. Most of the interviewees had more complex ideas and more careful understandings of world music and the people involved than the descriptions and short quotes in the signifiers section suggest. Their statements suggested more diverse interpretations of the data. For instance, nearly all the interviewees were very curious and open-minded towards unfamiliar musical instruments, styles, rhythms and unknown, traditional ways of dressing and appearing on stage. Also, they did enjoy the music and the musicians showing devotion and spreading happiness among them, which they might not have in the course of their everyday lives. While not knowing many of the languages being sung and possibly also not knowing the musical styles, they still kept listening and strengthened the idea that music somehow can cross borders of language and culture. And even though their interest in political questions appeared not to be very profound, the topics nonetheless were given a certain visibility, which they otherwise would not have received at all. Throughout most of my conversations with them, the interviewees ref lected strong interest in the musicians' lives, their musical heritage, their stories and the struggles they might have.

Taking the festival visitors' holistic attitudes towards world music from my interviews into account, the ways in which world music was experienced go way beyond the two narratives outlined above. Instead of simply perceiving and reproducing the ideas of world music that were presented to them

at the festivals, the visitors seemed to play a crucial role in shaping how they experienced world music. The ways of experiencing seemed to have proceeded in the way of "transform[ing] sensibilities and creat[ing] new ones, and not only to reproduce an existing order." (Hennion 2005: 132) It is the ability of the music listener to actively shape and create meanings of his or her experience of world music. These cannot be simply located at particular places, performances or in phenomena at the festival sites, from representations in media or from academic narratives, but have to be found out in interaction with the visitors themselves—for instance, by interviewing them. Therefore, as a conclusion and appeal for further research, world music festivals seem to present a musical genre that can be condensed into five signifiers which, however, are experienced in many different ways. Finding out the ways in which this happens in detail and describing the precise roles the visitors play in perceiving, transforming and shaping the genre of world music are suggestions for further research.

#### **Bibliography**

Liana Giorgi/Monica Sassatelli (eds.), Festivals and Cultural Public Sphere, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 173-189.

# **From desire for recognition to desire for independence**

World music filtered in the market economy

*Sandrine Le Coz*

"If artistic creation is always the expression of absolute subjective singularity, the gap and novelty inevitably become the touchstone of work's value.<sup>1</sup> "

Jean-Marie Schaef fer

In a global plethoric system where music, festivals and travel are offered in overabundance to individuals, creative practices must be leveled. Hence, institutions are responsible for establishing valuation's logic to classify artistic products. This contribution will involve the structuring of a sector of music industry in a full reconfiguration—the one still awkwardly designated by world music syntagma—into transnational and heterogenous networks of key players.

In this way, I propose to analyze the impact of their decision-making power in new art venues—what its participants commonly call markets, exhibitions, fairs. Circuits, hot spots, honorary awards, expert panels: the question that arises regarding this ecosystem's functioning is how is the value of an artistic act established and decreed, and what, therefore, is the value of the one who produces it? The word value comes from the Latin "valor", derived from "valere" which means "to be powerful". Whoever has value, therefore, becomes desirable and worthy of esteem. In economic jargon, we talk about useable value or exchange value. In this text, I will look at the socio-

<sup>1</sup> Seminar La création artistique, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

logical acceptance of value, defined by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (1991), as economy of greatness.

I will engage in an examination of value(s)-making within the world music industry, inserting my heuristic perspective at the heart of an axiology determined by its actors. For this purpose, I will adopt a participant observation's strategy, a "marginal secant" (Crozier/Friedberg 1977: 52) position, that will make my immersion as an insider researcher within a professional environment a lever for understanding its driving forces, its different and contradictory logics of action and as a way to peer into the evolution of its value's parameter.

In order to understand the zones of inf luence in which these interpersonal territories operate, it is essential to study their methods of linking. Conducting a thick description of new transnational connections, I'll demonstrate how music exchange occurs through market mechanisms—materialized by selective physical or virtual encounters—approaching the music industry's reality and its migration of sense thanks to the study of f lows, movements and inertia's forces weaving the weft of a contemporary globalized space.

# **The professional world music markets: inventory of a space with shifting geography**

The prices—and therefore the prizes—are not the privilege of economists. They constitute a central element in the experience of attachment and thus in the study of social structures underlying the exchanges. Music, as an important cultural commodity, has become decisive in terms of monetarization of artistic practice, to the point that the world music niche cannot avoid it.

World music: a worn-out language paradigm, a terminology with questionable historical connotations? Mathieu Rosati, whom I met during a meeting of the Collectif des musiques et danses du monde en Ile-de-France, defines world music as a conceivable compromise of communication that does not dispense to ref lect on the actions to be put behind, actions which belong to us. World music has aroused many fantasies and, in some way, has been fueled by its own myths. Why not deliberately set aside the endless debate on the legitimate use of this commercial label—in an absence of consensual defining framework (cf. Laborde 1997: 245)—to instead look at those who mobilize around the music as powerful vectors of economic values?

The professional world music markets, true platforms for negotiating international visibility, want, above all, to represent a means of interaction, to bring protagonists to exchange together in order to improve the functioning of their sector. These "expos" are then conceived as spaces of knowledge where commitment is total in order to establish the conditions for the creation of a network—a true watchword as a promise of providential encounters.

First of all, the discursive use of the overhanging category "market" participates in an efficient rhetorical process in terms of ideological authority. This aura of power is embodied in the world music sector by the superstructures of WOMEX (World Music Expo) in Europe and SXSW (South by Southwest) in the USA, which have a bilateral partnership. Would the reality of this professional world of world music be transfigured by the market's fetishism, this transcendent force producing a dominant ideology? Social relationships coagulate outside men, outside of the most immediate social relationships, because they end up being dependent on social abstractions such as money circulation, financial markets etc. (cf. Blanc/Vincent 2004). Thus, money consists in hypostasis, in the embodiment of a pure function, that of exchange between humans (cf. Simmel 1987). Would the music industry therefore become a regime of truth where culture is measured? Faced with this apparent omnipotence of the profitability logic, nothing could be better than leaving the f loor to three protagonists of these markets so that they can give us their own vision of this space at the crossroads of a social collective and individual imperatives.

Let's start with Bernard Aubert, former director of Babel Med, a professional market in Marseille that prematurely ended in 2018 after 13 years of "good and loyal service" to the world's music community:

They're called markets, but the question is, are they really markets? Do the co-ordinations around the tours really happen during these Expos? A market should not only present showcases. However, the current markets, for many, do not exceed the status of storefronts; the two are of ten confused, storefront and market. There are market specialists who go to all markets, but they're not necessarily the buyers, by the way. Monitoring is not evaluated for many expos. For ours, we have seen that between 20 and 40 additional dates are obtained for artists thanks to Babel Med. WOMEX is the superstructure, but what are the benefits? Due to its seniority, it enjoys a certain attractiveness, but what are the repercussions for artists in terms of tours and funding? Real work must be done on the follow up of artists af ter the exhibition, otherwise it is only limited to the aesthetic, auditory and intellectual pleasure that a festival provides. But there is a dif ference of nature between market and festival.

During the first and only edition of Borneo World Music Expo in Malaysia in 2014, I met Divya Bhatia, director of the RIFF (Rajasthan International Folk Festival) in Jodhpur (India). In addition, as a professor of cultural management, he talked about his market conception:

For the market, we—cultural operators—are just in front of one choice: to close it or to open it. To close it would be equal to fascism and to try to define it isn't our job. Our objective is to bring the artist to the audience. But how do we select the artists? First, we work with our intuition, because all the process is subjective, it's a matter of choice, of elective decisions. Then, in a second time, we think about the organization on a practical plan. There is a necessity to link all the dif ferent ways of media coverage for a band to be seen, not just the expos but all the ways which are attempts to seed something that can bring a fruit in the future whatever it could be because you don't know. The market can be absent in the creation. For example, the Rajasthani musicians who played with Jef f Lang didn't think about it at all and, in the end, they will showcase in the next WOMEX. So this is an example that the market can come af ter, it isn't influencing any creation even if it may have an impact af ter.

Emere Wano, artistic director of WOMAD in New Zealand, whom I met in Melbourne in 2011 at the Australasian World Music Expo, gives her vision of Oceanic artists' integration in the world music market:

Of course, there is an interdependence between the world music market that can format the artists in function of the audience and artists that format themselves in order to correspond to some criteria. But who is establishing the criteria of success on the one hand and those of being authentic on the other hand? With Sounds Aotearoa, we are trying to build the capacity and responsibility of indigenous Maori and Pacific artists, to form managers in

order to participate to the industry. We are trying to do something where no attention was paid to this in the Maori sector.

In the light of these remarks, we can emphasize both the paramount importance of penetrating Western markets and at the same time the emerging desire to create one's own mode of being on the market. Indeed, the geography of the economic power is still implicitly considered to be stronger in Europe and North America, meaning more well-paid opportunities, better technical conditions and increased visibility. But, at the same time, a necessity for Southern countries is felt to create a new formula for their own cultural development that would not have to duplicate that of the developed countries but just learn from them. By wishing to take over from perennial hegemonies, these newcomers nevertheless retain the same functioning as their predecessors, their existence beforehand being very compromised without those connections. Therefore, the world music protagonists find themselves gravitating in the same system, with, in all the expos, the same structure the first time developed by WOMEX: conferences, trade fairs, stands, speed meetings with personalized career coaching and showcases.

Since the professional market is seen as a springboard, a catalyst for economic opportunities, the participation of an artist would be crystallized as an investment—sooner or later—to internationally propel the aura of his creation. WOMEX, a symbolic reference point of the self-baptized "Womexicans" community, is however the subject of strong criticism about its capacity to fulfill this mission. The deprivation of space-time imposed on artists during showcases—these concerts in miniature—would enjoin the opposite effect: the forgetfulness facilitated by overcrowding. Indeed, the hiatus is considerable between the format, the rudimentary listening conditions and the crucial importance of capturing the target audience in record time because, under the guise of informality, contacts are formed, decisions are made and contracts are signed. The border between the concert hall where we speak about art and the backroom, the professional market, where we speak about money, is absolutely necessary for the preservation of the price and masks the fact that a whole set of people works to guarantee it.

#### **The role of intermediaries in valuation process**

The artist—as Howard Becker's (1982) theory of interaction emphasizes does not decide everything in a solipsistic manner; his work is constantly interacting with institutions that allow it to come into the world, confronting him with a range of determinations and particular strategies to adopt. If creativity, as a production of mind, is not depending on an external system, it is the case, however, for its presentation on a stage insofar as listening requires a structure. Who, then, are the architects, the conductors, who give themselves the vocation of promoting and disseminating this global creativity?

To make the passage from creation to reception possible, intermediaries are necessary, "gate-keepers" who present these shows to the audience, an audience which is itself a stakeholder in the artistic creation process. My interview with Manu Théron, leader of the iconic group Lo Cor de la Plana, is enlightening about the eminent role of the perspective-builder:

The programmer becomes almost an exhibition curator who links works to produce meanings. The view is not fixed but it doesn't emerge between the bearers of the works since they are not simultaneously presented. The works do not converse among themselves on an equal footing; the meaning appears only in the programmer or in the viewer.

The action of cultural operators is indeed crucial because their adopted mediations bring world music to audience and disclose, from one angle, the meaning they claim to be intrinsic to the musical works of otherness. The shows then become, by capillarity, "goods of belief" that demand (the audience) chooses based on who creates them (the artists and their representatives), perceiving only what they have been taught to see and hear. The professional markets work as authorities of classification and contribute to the evolution of the status on valuable scales. So, we attend an institutional construction which produces standards, horizons of expectations, deliberately granting itself the power of legitimization over the music by protecting its circulation.

At the hierarchy level, the same protagonists are interwoven between various institutions with differentiated status. For example, Gerald Seligman, former director of Borneo World Music Expo, Mercado Centroamericano de la Musica in Costa-Rica, and co-director of IOMMA (Indian Ocean

Music Market) on Reunion Island, was also, until 2009, the managing director of WOMEX and was head of EMI's strategic marketing, one of the most important majors in the global music market. Thus, the multi-polar networks of world music are affinity networks of co-optation, accounting for a certain "entre soi". Networking in world music is not limited to business; it is also and above all based on elective affinities, human relationships between peers, promoters, festival organizers, artists and on the confidence that they hold in each other as reliable colleagues, who are supposed to work in a spirit of collaboration and not competition: The weaving of social interaction is not done from acts of knowledge, but from the material provided by postures of recognition, as elementary forms of intersubjectivity (cf. Honneth 2007).

The question that arises is: within these competitive platforms, do we reveal, or do we build some value? Music can have intrinsic aesthetic value or instrumental value, but its emergence inside the professional markets reveals another concept: the "added value". What are the criteria, the "invariants" that allow programmers and cultural operators to make their choice? When categorization determines the value, how does the musical prescription work? The standard benefits from past success and the original is the guarantee of new success, but the already-known risks of getting tired and the new risks of displeasing (cf. Morin 2008). Thus, my main aspiration is to identify the actual global dynamics of diffusion in the world music industry while describing its process: the artistic fight for accreditation to be on stage. Not all evaluations are based on the same concept of value because there is no universal value but rather disjointed systems of values derived from representations. So, it appears essential to proceed to the analysis of selection criteria—promulgated by a fraction of professionals—in order to succeed in defining what builds the legitimacy and reputation of an artist at an international level. This ref lection inevitably leads to a questioning of assignment processes of the artistic value which is determined by the negotiations about what makes sense for its actors. Ideology is not first and foremost an illusion produced by the specialists of ideas, but the subjective and more or less refined organization of objective social appearances born out of the productive and merchant process (cf. Garo 2008). It is interesting to analyze the attempt of these intermediaries to objectify their selection process within a liability scheme, even though it remains fundamentally based on their own subjectivity. The first impression must deliver a strong emotion. While asserting

in unison that there is no magic formula for capturing attention, they point out certain conditions and prerequisites for assigning the value of the artist:

But how can programmers absolutely and objectively determine whether or not music will be accessible to an international audience? The same applies to the apprehension of originality. They are measured only in relative terms. There is no univocal measurement scale of this unlimited differentiation. Howard Becker (1982) examined the problems of the charts by indicating that this selectivity is partial because it is not based on a panoptic view of the artistic production of a society.

Moreover, the evaluation of quality combinations that make the difference remains relatively indecipherable and is based on a priori estimation, on a calculus of probabilities, which cannot be assimilated to an expertise of the creative act. We cannot objectively measure the initial talent, but we can only see that reputations, levers of achievement, widen these gaps and bring out the exogenous category of originality on the social scene.

Finally, the works of John Dewey, Nathalie Heinich and Luc Boltanski are of great help in analyzing how the bias of value's negotiation lets us catch a glimpse of the manufacture of a space of social relations. The challenges of social reproduction, in a configuration like the microcosm of professional world music markets, are easily identified thanks to the relationships maintained by its actors and the construction of their sustainability within, paradoxically, piecemeal meetings set around the world. What ensures their presence? A belief based on a rhetoric manifesting the necessity of belonging to these networks in order to make and maintain one's place. For exchange and cooperation to exist, there must be a system of reciprocal expectations:

these systems are deployed in worlds governed by the coherence of principles that are activated there (cf. Boltanski/Thévenot 1991).

 An archipelago of places, of justification cities (cf. Foucault 1970), is drawn, in a short-lived temporality, by the reputations conveyed all over the world on those meeting places, generating a performativity of the trade fair: the importance of attendance is built by the speech which makes the event's existence all the more essential. As Foucault (1970) would say, the creators are the instigators of discursiveness. Cultural operators, artists demonstrate a feeling of obligation to appear at WOMEX: if they are not recognizable, they incur the risk of dissolution of their visibility. If this collective configuration works and comforts, it is because its prerogatives respond to the prevailing desire for recognition from actors who accept playing in this family compound. As Nathalie Heinich (2017) notes, the power of values especially resides in the fact that they are lived by actors neither as simple illusions, nor as logical arguments, but as imperatives strongly affectively invested. Anthropology deals with observing, dissecting prospects, enthusiasms, satisfactions and disappointments felt by actors within some configuration. In spite of a feeling of resignation on the part of stake-holders in front of a fundamentally unequal system, the professional markets remain moments of sociable excitement, opportunities of conviviality, in order to form a unique entity on the global scale. These privileged times of networking during trade shows could be indicated as epiphanies which crystallize the symbolic and material investments of world music professionals.

#### **Fieldwork as an insider researcher**

"A triple promise falls to the anthropologist: to himself, to his discipline and to his object."

Sophie Caratini (2012)

In 2016, I was in charge of diffusion and programming for the Festival de l'Imaginaire in the Maison des Cultures du Monde, and since 2017, I have been an artistic advisor to several international festivals: World Sacred Spirit Festival (Rajasthan, India), Festival des Musiques Sacrées (Fès, Morocco)

and Al Kamandjati Festival (Palestine). The adoption of a new posture, at the interface between institution, artists and audiences, has enabled me to live these years of professional learning, not as a derivative effect but rather as an instrument of knowledge, allowing me to alter the gaze on my object. For the ethnomusicologist Michel de Lannoy, the key position of "talent seekers" that of programmers—requires a rigor equal to the ethnomusicologist's in the field, in the proper relationship to build between his own problem and the studied object (cf. Lannoy, quoted in Defrance 1996: 336-338).

In this immersive perspective, I therefore question the place and positioning of the embedded anthropologist, at the intersection of the worlds of work and research, and more generally the multiple forms of engagement induced by applied ethnography. This new status and ethical approach, involving an analytical distancing specific to my discipline, induce constant learning about how to elucidate the gossip practice, how to thwart seduction, how to neutralize pressurization from artists who are victims themselves of social bulimia. My participant observation is, indeed, located on a moving field dealing with conjunctural issues, power relations, funding, qualms, etc.

Investigating the ambivalence and the unthought-of in the system by placing myself inside leads me to practice a "cameralistic type of activity", that is, an activity that would amount to make environments and facts that are more or less transparent visible to the concerned individuals but remain poorly known to those who want to act on these environments and transform them (cf. Lenclud, quoted in Baré 1995: 65-84). If we take a closer look, the Greek etymology of the word "scene" points to what is behind it, which enables the front of the scene, the stage. To quote Dwyer and Buckle (2009):

Our position as qualitative researchers is from the standpoint of being *with* our participants. The *with* is in *relation to* our participants and can suggest a tensioned space. As Sidebotham (2003) ref lected, his personal and professional roles added to his research, and through his research he learned what he might never have through his personal and professional experience. So knowing an experience requires more than simply having it; knowing implies being able to identify, describe, and explain (cf. Fay 1996).

For this purpose, it would be appropriate to survey a space between, perceived not as a path but as a dwelling place for people so that insider and outsider are not disparate destinations, but a space occupied by the researcher (cf. Dwyer/Buckle 2009). Without having to justify my presence in the field, I certainly enjoy privileged access and facilitated relationships of trust, but

can, at the same time, meet the difficulties that this posture poses. Fieldwork "at home" is possibly even more complex in terms of the personal relationships it impinges upon (cf. Chiener 2002).

The first field, the one on which we keep coming back, always seems to bear lessons, no doubt because it corresponds to the initial experience, the initiation of an encounter with others that will never again come with the same strength. I had the wisdom to understand that I was there first to follow the movement, see and hear (cf. Augé 2013).

My first observed international professional market was the Australasian World Music Expo in Melbourne in 2011, which launched my ref lection on the conditions of access disparity of the so-called native artists on local and international stages.

The question of representativeness is omnipresent in "escort discourses" (Cheyronnaud 2002) of traditional music: what do we want to represent? Would putting on stage an artist with an "ethnic" identity be better to represent the reality of a group and its members? How can the authenticity of an artist or of a musical ensemble be judged, how can what is important about a culture be decreed and presented?

Placing musical practices under the seal of identity, beyond representing a major danger of reifying the fossilization of cultures, initiates processes of putting artists in competition. For example, only one group is selected to represent New Caledonia at the Australasian World Music Expo. Between Ykson and Tevita, two artists met in Melbourne, the trajectories diverge: the first, Kanak, was invited to all the indigenous festivals and the second, who is not Kanak, was much less distributed on the circuit. Here the words of Julien Mallet (2002) resound: the commercial attempt of hegemony from music industry—taking world music as a bait for profit—would therefore have the effect of subjecting otherness to the dominant structures by retaining only the exotic difference, removing it from this universality to which it claims to lead.

At the Australasian World Music Expo, I also met Rhoda Roberts, artistic director and aboriginal activist. She told me about her misadventure with WOMEX before Gurrumul became an iconic figure of Aboriginal music with resounding success in Europe: "WOMEX were saying they didn't want Gurrumul because he's not Aboriginal enough. I was accused of lying to the director of WOMEX: 'You told me he was primitive! He's western, he plays a western guitar'." The frustrations of being defined by their aboriginality

relate to the inability of the music industry to integrate hybrid contemporary music. Faced with these norms, barely veiling an ecstatic and nostalgic approach of a time when it was still possible to discover "untouched" indigenous people, an artist, Charlie McMahon, proposed to challenge them by being the first white man with one arm to play didgeridoo. What in the musical matter itself, in the intrinsic character of music, allows the existence of those essentialist discourses? No replies. In a willingness to bring artists and audience together through recognition, the institution ends up orchestrating a restraining order due to an arbitrarily imposed mediation in the link between them. On the pretense of wanting to introduce the unique, the unreleased, to show, in a lancinating obsession, musical authenticity as a tacit inheritance on a territory, the institutional compartmentalization of aesthetics hardens, dramatizes otherness and conceals the richness of emerging creative music practices, yet at the heart of a new cartography composed of syncretic "narrative identities." (Ricoeur 1985)

Following my Australian experience, I decided, in 2014, to look more specifically at a recent phenomenon: the WOMEX consulting relationships with regional markets. As Arslan (2018) affirms, field is a multilayered concept that does not depend on geography, but on the self-constructed identity of the ethnographer and his or her aim.

The exponential creation of world music professional markets—and their international array—brought me to analyze the WOMEX strategies used to increase its inf luence by an expansion of satellites, which eminently raises the issue of the reproduction of hegemonic relationships of power. On purpose, I did not choose to study one professional market because I wanted to assume a transnational bias by concentrating my analysis on their reticular dimension. In the light of their emergence, it's about describing the swarming strategy thanks to interconnections between decision-making actors and the rhetorics mobilized by them.

My anthropological positioning is divided at the intersection of several affiliation groups. Therefore, I do not favor any site but, on the contrary, juxtapose different levels of geography: to the globalization of the fields corresponds the mobility of the researcher (cf. Copans 2000). In multi-sited ethnography, comparison emerges from putting questions to an emergent object of study whose contours, sites, and relationships are not known beforehand (cf. Marcus 1995).

 The notion of circuit allows me to analyze decisive places and key moments, or catalysts, where the protagonists in the game of world music meet. The circulation seems indeed to represent an essential component, even a condition of the actors' existence in this artistic world. The orientation towards places is important because it allows me to identify people and networks, to map actors who appear then disappear.

My participant observation with the pioneer markets of world music includes the following places: WOMEX in Budapest (2015), created in 1994, Babel Med in Marseille (from 2009 to 2017), Celtic Connections in Glasgow, Scotland (2017) and APAP in United States, New York (2017). These events constitute a part of my research but, above all, my ref lection has been focused, since five years, on the new generation of regional trade fairs of world music (including "musiques actuelles") such as AME in Praia, Cape Verde (2014), Borneo World Music Expo in Kuching, Malaysia (2014), Visa For Music in Rabat, Morocco (2014), IOMMA in Saint-Gilles, Reunion Island (2015), MOSHITO in Johannesburg, South Africa (2015), Mundial Montreal in Canada (2015), Tallinn Music Week in Estonia (2016), Circulart in Medellin, Colombia (2017), Porto Musical in Recife, Brazil (2018), PMX in Ramallah, Palestine (2018), Primera Linea in La Havana, Cuba (2018) and ACCES in Nairobi, Kenya (2018). These events aim to develop music industry around local actors and to create new international disseminating channels. Therefore, they give shape to economic partnerships and allow new territorial connections that end up creating true "mental landscapes" (Appadurai 1997), unprecedented archipelagos of meanings in which the economic poles are more and more in the Southern part of the globe: Lusophone Africa, Indian Ocean, Latin America, Maghreb/Mashrek, East Africa, etc.

I will look here at two of them: the Atlantic Music Expo (Cape Verde) and the Indian Ocean Music Market (Reunion Island) where I led fieldwork in 2014 and 2015. The AME highlights the specificity of its discourse around the identity marker of creolity. Its founder, Mario Lucio, former minister of culture and a musician himself, presented his ambition in these terms:

Ten islands caught in between three continents, a mother tongue embracing words from all languages, a wide variety of music styles such as funana, batuco, morna and coladera, or else mazurka, contredanse, waltz and samba. Such is Cabo Verde, the country where the world's creolization originated. Cabo Verde was the first transatlantic turntable of slavery trade. The ministry of culture is now willing to make it a positive exchange point based upon music and culture.

Reunion Island, also, has grown as a hub for an entire region, the Indian Ocean. It develops projects with neighboring islands Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, Comoros, Mayotte and, simultaneously, has acquired a place on the world market. Not satisfied with the annual visibility granted by WOM-EX and thanks to the European Union's support, the IOMMA was created.

These two new markets form a crossroads establishing bridges between continents while highlighting a rhetoric of insularity that exhibits its assets—especially touristic ones—outside and seeks exogenous contributions. It's important to note this insularity's topography insofar as it spatializes, geographically circumscribes, a mental space of "entre soi". The associates already acquired at WOMEX go to a place where strong cultural history requires them to join. They go there to discover, to change from the "conventional" framework of European metropolises, but they'll find the same people. Following these examples, more and more expos have been developed on islands like Cuba (Primera Linea), Mauritius (MOMIX) or the Canary Islands. Another significative dynamic is the creation of fairs based on a presumed common "identity", on a privileged transcultural dialogue, between wide geographical areas: for Exibmusica (Portugal) it's Latin America, for Crossroads (Czech Republic) Central and Eastern Europe.

It should be noted that these communities of actors, a priori unshakeable and all powerful, are nonetheless dependent on political and economic institutions that regularly recall the transitory and volatile nature of these events by suspending their funding, thus resulting in the temporary cancellation of the market or even its complete end, e.g. the end in 2018 of the Mediterranean market Babel Med; the suspension of Porto Musical in 2017; the strong threats to Atlantic Music Expo and Visa for Music even though they have been considered promising platforms since their creation.

The evolution of the relation between these regional professional markets and the WOMEX has been, moreover, fulgurant in a five year time span: the WOMEX which was sought-after when these platforms were created as a marker of credibility, as a way of increasing professional capacity, is now denied its role and usefulness in relation to the financial shortfall and accumulated debts due to its expensive service for franchising (with the label Piranha). As a result of this shift, but not only because of it, new networks have appeared between regional markets themselves and have formed new clusters of inf luence:

The inconsistency issue of this sector is crucial insofar as it's fast and f luctuating: are we heading from now on to a segmentation of the world music markets or to a unique global network of interconnected actors? Wouldn't the proliferating profusion of professional world music markets correspond to what Baudrillard (1986) calls the saturation of a system neutralized by its own strengths?

## **Interstices, intervals and bridges: at the time of new prescription**

"There is no single, absolute, privileged system, but subsystems; between them, cracks, holes, gaps. The irreducible manifests af ter each reduction."

Henri Lefebvre (1968)

One might believe that when one is dominated, there is no other choice but to occupy the designated place in the framework delivered by the dominant power. For instance, does the expectation of a "permanent revolution"*,* induced by the music industry, undermine the very concept of marginal? It's nevertheless important to highlight the fact that the artists are not reducible to the sum of the predeterminations which weigh on them. Monique Sélim evokes, for instance, "kaleidoscopes revealing endless meshings between incorporation of local and global dominations, exile fantasies, alienations, restatements and shifting constraints.2 " The final step will be now to analyze the amplitude of this issue of situational adjustments in the manufacture and broadcasting of the sounds of today.

Transnational practices are not specific to the world music market; they also occur for other artistic genres such as jazz (Jazz lam in Barcelona) or performing arts like theater, circus, dance or street art (MAPAS on the Canary Islands). In the field of "musiques actuelles", there are also MAMA (Paris) and Linecheck (Milan), which actually integrate world music in their showcases. Bill Smith, member of the American company Eye for Talent—whom I met at the Borneo World Music Expo—precisely evokes a significative shift in the world music valuation and reveals how institutions, in order to last, make way for emergent niches:

Artists need to incorporate elements that people enjoy, like hip-hop. The market is dif ferent of the artistic vision. Contemporary manners are now more interesting for the market than pure folk traditions. It's a recent change in the world music market, a turn into the electronic, the alternative music.

We could also find the same dynamics of reputations, trends and value negotiation in Biennales or contemporary art fairs (FIAC, Paris). But beyond those large-scale events, more and more emerging independent music markets are focusing on entrepreneurship like Show Me (Switzerland), created in 2018 at the artist Blick Bassy's initiative, or IndiEarth Exchange (India), a trade event for independent music, film and media. The link of music with the creative industry is more asserted than ever, especially in Africa and South and Central America. For Octavio Arbelaez, director of Circulart (Colombia), whom I met in Medellin, culture is the most important factor in generating wealth nowadays. Panama, Nigeria, Argentina, Chile: the global role of cultural operators is now to take advantage of music's power to increase the economic force of their country.

Behind the term artist, there is a multitude of logics of action, of different economies within trajectories driven by different conventions. The artists who are visible at fairs, inscribed in the art market's laws, do not prevent those, transformed into real "artisans-entrepreneurs", from existing at the

<sup>2</sup> Seminar Anthropologie politique de la globalisation, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.

periphery and from developing their own networks by creating new cartographies of membership. This is particularly obvious with the growth of virtual network platforms allowing individuals to federate their initiatives and to directly share resources with this back and forth dynamics between singularity and need for belonging.

World music 2.0, post world music, world music revisited: the regime of the music industry's prescription, the figure of authority regarding the qualitative identification of taste, has been indeed upset by the digital boom and the fact that now everyone can become an inf luencer, whether on a blog, on a YouTube channel or even a producer with a home studio, which is completely restructuring the relationship between artist and audience and between artist and professional intermediary which is the topic of the Future Music Forum (Barcelona). With an appropriate name or an evocative native myth, the appointment of a friends' group will appear from outside as a fervent world of activity and the online exaggeration can turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy (cf. Clayton 2016).

In this wild disintermediation, artists' presence and communication on social networks seem to be a "sine qua non" condition of their new autonomy; nowadays, even Madonna posts on Instagram. The unlimited access to musical creation online brings the artists, one more time, to distinguish themselves in a regime of evanescence, to stand out by drawing their own path among a multiplicity of tags and new categories which don't elude the risk of homogenization. The digital era with these new spaces of diffusion and interaction—where consumer, amateur and professional are more and more difficult to differentiate—raises a lot of issues in terms of value attribution. From prescribers, we've moved to inf luencers but especially to online aggregators, to playlist editors, who have, precisely, acquired the increased role of creating value by making their artists visible and identifiable by the greatest number. It is, however, important to question the expertise of these extremely competitive distribution platforms (Believe, Klox, Spinnup, Tradespotting) regarding the appropriate targeting of audiences. Their ranks include not longstanding musical specialists but rather geniuses of databases, algorithms of recommendation, assisted by the artificial intelligence of the machine, who see their adaptability to a very wide panel of music as an asset.

All the means to try to be more inventive and create visibility are good. With Goover, the customer is paid by listening. In other development systems of micro-inf luencers, such as Verve, the word-of-mouth process and recommendation are replicated on a larger scale by converting fans into ambassadors in exchange for rewards.

The world music 2.0 takes shape based on the fundamental web's asymmetry. It's an autochthonous native structure of the internet in compliance with the logic of information economy. More than creating it, is worth knowing where to find it. The artists take a back seat. The fact that an intermediary can have a stronger impact on the meaning and on the reception of a song than the one who has created it, is one of the constitutive paradoxes of world music 2.0. (cf. Clayton 2016).

Last but not least, if the Internet and streaming platforms—these new "machines du goût" (Gras 2014)—have somehow improved artists' visibility and their symbolic value, it has unfortunately not been the same so far regarding the economic value, namely their financial incomes. Indeed, the digital contents have truly become collective goods (cf. Bacache et al. 2010), impossible to sell and to extract value from, insofar as they can easily circulate from one consumer to another. An album that was worth between 15-20 Euros is now included on platforms whose unlimited access costs 10 Euros per month. Denis Ladegaillerie, Believe's boss, asserts that as long as you don't have quality of service, something that justifies the payment, the price of music is zero euro (cf. Fanen 2017). For his colleague, Arnaud Chiaramonti, music has become contents like any other, which you have to be able to listen to with the least affect to spot artists according to audience research figures, popularity on social networks and ability to make it on the right playlists. The heart of tomorrow's music business is a technical infrastructure (Ibid).

Therefore, compensation scales and value allocation are now organized around the unique criterion of the circulation intensity defined by clickbait, number of views on YouTube or likes on Facebook. Only an exponential ridership finds a market value on Internet, anything that does not produce a huge impact in the very short term is excluded from the outset (cf. Brunet 2018). The following helps soften the blow of this disarming observation.

The most appropriate measures are not quantifiable: a song which settles in the mind of all the ones who learn it by heart, a choral song that lif ts a room full of strangers on a shared emotion, the soundtrack of a first kiss that af ter decades still leaves two lovers transfixed and speechless. The value of these songs is inside ourselves (cf. Clayton 2016).

#### **Conclusion**

I shall end this paper with Michel Agier's (2013) words: "Anthropology has to shift its view, or more exactly duplicate it, while transforming its manners to investigate, to accompany the transformations and the movements of the actors and the studied practices, starting with networks rather than normative structures."

By considering local and international scales simultaneously, the professional world music markets and its virtual go-between constitute a point of entry to empirically question the impact of the globalization within cultural industries. They also incite to think about the function of representations in order to move from the desire to recognize to the challenge to see.

Through the circulation of musical practices at the crossroads of genres and geographical spaces, undeniable relations of power are drawn which raise the fundamental issue of access to cultural diversity for a wider audience. From the circulation spaces of WOMEX and its international satellites to the digital platforms and their increasing number of services providers, the discriminating power relationships are reproduced with a lot more strength, increasing the role of reputations and inf luencer networks. Therefore, we're observing a constant and parallel development of possibilities and disparities for artists' visibility insofar as the evaluations, the expertises, are made from non-representative samples of artistic exponential creativity upon which the assumed "objectivity" of selection builds itself, accounting for a bigger heuristic gap regarding the legitimate understanding of musical practice and creative talent.

In this paper, I have tried to demonstrate the functioning of a professional micro-society in terms of explicit conventions and shared equivalency systems. As it owns these objective values, a plurality of subjective commitments is nevertheless unbreakable among its members, serving as a motivation to develop distinct action strategies. The changing role of intermediaries from a transnational market centered on big trade fairs to new satellites and then to the current digital platforms has allowed me to observe the mutation of value parameter in the music industry around the world: previously indexed

to a presumed authenticity of a singular territory, then coupled to independent creative attempts bridging transcultural spaces, it is now entrusted to statistics and maps of listening. The qualitative value of the artistic message belongs to the old world; instead, databases reign supreme!

### **Bibliography**

l'anthropologie: Un essai de réf lexion collective depuis la France, Paris: Karthala, pp. 65-84.

Morin, Edgar (2008): L'esprit du temps, Paris: Armand Colin.

Orléan, André (2011): L'Empire de la valeur: Refonder l'économie, Paris: Seuil. Ricoeur, Paul (1985): Temps et Récit, Paris: Seuil.

# **The invention of African art music** Analyzing European-African classical cross-over projects

*Nepomuk Riva*

## **The Black Beethoven—an African answer to the dominance of Western classical music?**

Since the 1970s, a popular belief circulating within the Afro-community worldwide has held that Ludwig van Beethoven was African. Websites point to his African ancestry, his dark skin, the physiognomy of his face, his social context and the fact that his colleagues called him "black" or a "Moor." (cf. Raptorific 2010; Rinehart 2013; Owono 2015; Maarten 2017) In contrast to French composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745–1799), who was only nicknamed "Black Mozart" for his Guadeloupean descent and composition style, this discourse sees Beethoven as a composer "whitewashed" by Europeans. Interestingly, these theories also reference Beethoven's compositions. Some authors perceive West-African polyrhythmic structures in his piano works and have produced special interpretations of his piano sonatas to prove his "African roots." (ANY 2015)

There is no need to compare this conspiracy theory with the historical facts, but the discussion shows that European classical music and its worldwide dissemination today have resulted in postcolonial reactions from African contexts. The "myth of Beethoven's descendent" can be interpreted as an inferiority complex because in contrast to Asians, Africans have few roles in the Western classical music scene. The myth can also be seen as a sign of resistance. Africans no longer want to accept the unique position of classical European art music. They want to overcome the image of their so-called "underdeveloped" musical cultures. By reclaiming a famous European composer as their compatriot, they want to draw attention to possible interconnections between European and African music cultures.

Unfortunately, most European-African classical cross-over productions that have enjoyed great popularity in recent decades are rather Eurocentric. Although they invite several African-born musicians for joint music projects and give them the possibility to present themselves to an international audience, they do not change the dominance of the Western music scene. Part of the problem is that they do not start out from an African viewpoint but from a European perspective, searching for exotic enrichments of its own popular musical canon. These productions also follow old-fashioned "comparative musicology" methods, comparing and mixing different sounds and rarely trying to promote an exchange of different social and cultural contexts.

In this article, I want to analyze four cross-over productions created between 1992-2006 that were produced by major labels and gained successful distribution in the Western hemisphere. Every single one works with different musical sources and constructs the European-African connection differently. The first three are the most popular productions that have constituted the genre, while the last one is less known but portrays a different approach to European-African collaboration. First, *Pieces of Africa* (1992) by the Kronos Quartet claims to represent African art music played by Africans and members of the United States Kronos Quartet. This production clearly wants to address Western listeners of classical music. Second, in *Lambarena: Bach to Africa* (1993), French musician and producer Hughes de Courson and Gabonese musician Pierre Akendengué mix Bach with so-called "traditional" Gabonese music to honor organ player, Bach expert and medical doctor Albert Schweitzer. Here, the producers want to reach a broader audience composed not only of experts in the field of Christian baroque music, but those who come from the educated middle class. Third, *Mozart the Egyptian I+II* (1997/2005) was also produced by de Courson in collaboration with cultural attaché and Egyptian academic Ahmed El Maghraby. In these two volumes, they explore possible musical connections between Mozart's classical music and Egyptian music. The important role North African music ensembles play in this production shows that the producers want to enter the world music market with their product. Finally, I want to draw attention to Austrian group MoZuluArt and its album *Zulu Music Meets Mozart* (2006). In this project, three Zimbabwean singers and an Austrian piano player interpret Mozart's music against the musical backdrop of Southern African choir-singing

traditions. This production represents pieces that were developed collaboratively within the group and had been tested on stage before they were recorded. The album is mainly meant for an audience that knows the artists from their performances or the media and wants to own their recordings.

In looking at these four examples, I am interested in the production process and in the audio-visual and textual messages these albums intend to convey. Wherever possible I tried to get into contact with the producers, the composers or the performers and to discuss with them the long-term impact of their albums. Does the label "cross-over" guarantee musical cooperation on the same eye-level? Concerning the production process this entails, do the projects evolve out of a collaborative work or do Western musicians determine the outcomes of the project? Concerning the performances and distribution, the question is whether both partners gain from the project in the same way. Analyzing the audio-visual elements of these albums, I want to show which image of Africa is constructed by these music projects. Do they simply reproduce colonial concepts and stereotyped images of "African music"? Or does the intercontinental collaboration lead to new forms of portraying diverse African societies and their music? I believe this research is important to show how the most successful albums of this genre determine a Western image of Africa that most of the time follows colonial imaginations. At the same time, it uncovers the power dynamics between Western art music culture and African music that still prohibits most African musicians from entering the Western art music scene.

Before analyzing these productions in detail, I want to ref lect on their implications for the terms "Africa", "music" and "classical art music". A critical look at African colonial history is also needed to reveal what Western classical music means to Africans. Finally, the participation of Africans and the target audience of these productions are questioned.

# **"European-African cross-over projects" in the context of postcolonialism**

To analyze cross-over projects with African music and musicians, the meaning of the term "Africa" used within the productions must first be defined. Considering the use of this term is crucial because since the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 17th century and the colonial exploration of the continent

in the 19th century, Europeans always created an image of Africa that supported their political and economic interests. Following Edward Said's theory of orientalism (Said 1979), Europeans constructed a collective image of the whole continent as a counterpart to Europe, meaning "uncivilized", "heathen", "wild" and "animalistic". Therefore, if producers of these cross-over albums use the term "Africa" collectively and combine it with the imagination of "wildness" and "nature" in their audio-visual or textual presentation, they reproduce these colonial views on Africa and already show a certain white supremacy towards African music. On the other hand, producers that give a geographical reference to the African continent or specify an ethnic group and its musical culture will more likely have a serious interest in a musical exchange on the same eye-level.