Music in the World: Selected Essays

Timothy Taylor is formalizing and extending the map of today’s musical landscape he has recently traced in Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present. He here broadens the time frame to deal with 20th-century as well as 21st-century music, and in order to display the plurality of modes in which globalizing capitalisms have shaped the production and consumption of music, he gives us a set of jewel-like essays. Some of them address the rise of new technologies (such as the player piano, an analog technology, but he also includes digital). Other chapters consider the increased emphasis on taste in the cultural industries, others look at the effects of globalization on the rise in music-making and listening of such concepts as ?intangible cultural heritage.” Taylor is a leading expert on the workings of the music industry, and here he gives us a splendid essay on its efforts to genericize ?world music,” putting it in a place amenable to the needs of broadcasters, advertisers, and filmmakers. And of course he deals with the commodification of music as sound, the employment of sophisticated search systems which enable users to find music they want to hear in a virtual paradise of unlimited quantities of easily accessible recordings, all this while including a chapter on world music festivals. Too, he takes up early 20th-century composers (Stravinsky and Debussy, principal among them) to explore the ways they could hear unfamiliar music as something they could appropriate for use in their own music?corresponding with the historical rise of finance capital and its ideologies of exchangeability. This book shows how the study of music has suffered a conspicuous absence of analysis of culture and of music and emotion in the West.