Overview
Highlights the role of arts and culture in the making of geographical scale
Analyses how music has imposed, normalised or contested a range of politicised scalar relations
Discusses examples ranging from funk and grime to antifascist protest songs and colonial Christian hymns
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About this book
This open access book shows how geographical scales are made through music.
Scales are sets of spatial frames, abstractions or categories that denote the size, proportion, level, extent or hierarchical relations of phenomena. They are neither natural nor neutral but actively produced, with real political effects. But what role do cultural practices play in the production of scale?
Phil Dodds addresses this question by focusing on music, arguing that music scholarship has both most to gain from and most to offer to a fuller conceptualisation of how geographical scale is culturally produced. Dodds suggests that music scholars should treat scales as open questions, and as phenomena potentially made through musical practices, rather than as stable categories for framing other arguments about, say, ‘local’ or ‘global’ music. He analyses how the meaning of ‘the local’ is affected by the aesthetics of popular music, and how the relationship between the particular and the general is fused through common musical conventions.
Music and the Cultural Production of Scale explores diverse musical examples – including Janelle Monáe’s concept albums, key tracks in the grime genre, protest songs at environmental and anti-fascist demonstrations, and nineteenth-century colonial hymn-singing – to demonstrate how we already live in a world whose scales are made by music. The book also shows that music has the potential to produce a world scaled otherwise.Keywords
Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Phil Dodds is a researcher in the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences at Lund University, Sweden, where he also lectures in musicology and sound studies. He has a PhD in Geography from the University of Edinburgh, UK, and is the author of The Geographies of Enlightenment Edinburgh (Boydell Press, 2022).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Music and the Cultural Production of Scale
Authors: Phil Dodds
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36283-5
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023
License: CC BY
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-36282-8Published: 05 October 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-36283-5Published: 04 October 2023
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VIII, 108
Topics: Music, Human Geography, Human Geography