The Sonorous Spectacle World Music Performance Practice as Discourse zur Erlangung des philosophischen Doktorgrades an der Philosophischen Fakultät der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen vorgelegt von Charissa Arlette Granger aus Oranjestad, Aruba Göttingen 2018 1. Prof. Dr. Birgit Abels (Musicology) 2. Prof. Dr. Regina Bendix (Cultural Anthropology) Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 08.12.2016, Göttingen For C. A. G. & Sarah Bartmann Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 1 World music framing practices: roots and mapping music to place ................................... 35 2 Musical performance and the negotiation of difference ...................................................... 63 3 Notes on a sonorous spectacle: How the Other is created through framing ....................... 88 4 Disrupting the sonorous spectacle: Musically moving the self and Other together .......... 112 5 Power relations and world music: Understanding the discursive dimensions of music ... 127 6 Comprehending discourse musically: A challenge to the textual emphasis ..................... 163 Epilogue: On a world of music: Another way of knowing (in) world music ......................... 212 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 238 Acknowledgement This work, together with my previous education and performances, could not have been possible without the support of many people. First and foremost I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Birgit Abels for sharing her insight and her constant critical approach to understanding music. I thank my first music teacher, Fr. Sydney Michael Jacob, who planted the seed that grew to be my love for music and for being a great source of encouragement. I would also like to thank Prof. Liam Teague for being a constant inspiration and influence in my musical development. I thank Vanessa Richardson for shelter, loud laughs and the best experience of being home away from home during my research trips to The Netherlands. For sharing recordings and stories, I thank Jean Raabe. I would also like to thank the members of the DFG-funded project research group Moving Music. Space, Meaning, Transformation. I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the GSGG, Göttingen and the DAAD that has enabled this research project to come to fruition. I would like to thank Britta Lesniak, Rochelle Jacob and Friedlind Riedel for annotations, suggestions and valuable comments offered on parts of this work. I am grateful to Frauke Lühning for sharing books, stories and for providing me with shelter and two pan sticks within the Amsterdam Bijlmer steelband. I thank Enca L. for being a constant presence in my life and Férdia Stone-Davis for her support, listening ear and feedback on ideas concerning this project. Heartfelt thanks to Tanja Olschewski and Stephen Fernand for their friendliness and for bringing me ice-cream while in the final stages of writing. I warmly thank Chanise Granger for keeping me grounded, laughing and sane through life. In particular I would like to express an appreciative thanks to my parents Cynthia A. Granger and Conrad A. Granger for allowing me to indulge in my passion and for introducing me to music particularly calypso, soca, and steelband at a young age. I could not have completed this work without their constant emotional encouragement and financial support. I am most thankful for my past and present education, as well as the institutional and financial support I have received. These instances have granted me a most beautiful music career and have forever formed me as a human being. Abstract The Sonorous Spectacle World Music Performance Practices as Discourse aims to situate contemporary world music performance practice as a sonorous spectacle. It does so in order to shed light on the power relations involved in and the discursive nature of musical performance within world music and to explore the various idiosyncrasies of the category. It will thereby attempt to understand musical performance within the world music festival space. Herein questions are posed about the framing practices of the world music festival space and the different music-making practices such as steelpan, calypso, rumba, and soukous that were staged at the various festivals attended for this research. The issue of Othering, which has been a point of contention from the inception of world music’s development, remains the springboard of this research project. The overarching question that is considered here is that of the relation between and interaction of the self and other. The research intends to think about this in broad post-colonial terms and in the way the notion of self/other is embedded in academic discourse on world music, constituted by its literary history and methodological approach. I conceive of world music performance practice as the techniques, methods and framing practices, which are used in the construction of world music festival stages. In being critical of the above processes, the concept of the spectacle1 provides an ideal platform from which to explore the mechanisms involved in relations of power. To construct a model for understanding the interconnected nature of power relations, Othering, practices of framing, the production and acquisition of knowledge and musical performance, this work draws strongly from Guy Debord and his concept of the spectacle – the idea that society is mediated by representations and images, thereby separating individuals from each other. I will also draw from Michel Foucault and his concept of discourse2 – the idea that discourse is always connected to power relations and knowledge. Equipped with these conceptual tools for the analysis of framing practices, attention will be granted to how some discourses and representations have embodied, shaped and created meaning systems within contemporary world music performance practice, how they have gained the status and dominate how both world music and its performance practice are defined and organized. In this, it remains that alternative discourses are unheeded and circumvented, yet potentially they present sites where hegemonic practices may be discerned, questioned, disputed, denounced and withstood. Turning to the festival space the project asks 1 Debord 1983; 1998. 2 Foucault 1980a; 1995; 2002. how notions discussed academically take form sonically within the world music festival space and how we might be able to think through these notions with music. Keywords: contemporary world music performance practices, framing, sonorous spectacles, Steelpan, music as discourse, Calypso, knowledge, musical performance, power relations Introduction Music is an unfathomable apparition: melodic, harmonic and rhythmic speech, spoken to the body, it constructs identities in diverse contours to give texture and growth to emotions and thoughts. ~Charissa Granger The Sonorous Spectacle: World Music Performance Practice as Discourse examines the world music category, which plays a role in shaping the way musics comprised under this category are thought of, spoken about, staged and how music scholars understand their histories within the broadly conceived field of musicology. It is an inquiry into the ways musical performances1 and music-making practices divulge unacknowledged histories of those often positioned as Other. I will draw on the concept of the spectacle2 in order to make two arguments: First, the spectacularization of world music performance practice3 constructs various musical and cultural stories. This spectacular framing has a point of reference such as the textual description of certain musics and musicians, which is uncritical of the constructed Other and inattentive to musical performance. Such points of reference ascribe meaning to music and people. I will critically examine the concept of the spectacle and argue that, in lieu of critiquing Otherness and exoticism in world music, a concentration on the mechanisms of their formations and propellers are suitable. My second argument goes beyond the first, suggesting that conceiving of world music festival performances as discourse may be more befitting at ascertaining how otherness is negotiated in music-making and performance. I employ the sonorous spectacle for its potential to lay bare present relations of power that emerge from the festival’s framing. I will do so to illustrate how music moves to disrupt the spectacle; even though music is part of the spectacle. What remains most interesting and provocative about the musics that comprise the category is the ways in which hints of Otherness and attitudes of Othering emerge from the practices involved in staging them at summer festivals and expositions such as WOMAD and WOMEX. 1 Cook 2003. 2 Debord 1983. 3 I use practice in its singular form for it refers to the process involved in how participants and organizers establish a particular world music performance practice. 1 Race and geographic location determine otherness, given the long histories of colonization, decolonization and in certain instances slavery and segregation throughout the world.4 During the last two decades5 scholars produced an impressive body of literature establishing historical antecedent for contemporary understandings about world music, however there remains a paucity of research on the performance practice of world music in relation to otherness. What can