Keywords

This book has analysed four examples that demonstrate the richness of music’s engagement with scale. I have sought to show how diverse musical practices among diverse social groups can contribute to the cultural production of scale. The analysis of Janelle Monáe shows how pop musicians can be highly ‘agile’ in their use of scale, producing music that works at multiple scales while also subverting, splitting and reimagining the relationships between scales such as ‘the body’, ‘the metropolitan’ and ‘the global’. In focusing on the work of Wiley and Nadia Rose, I have indicated how the intensely local or postcode-scale aesthetics of grime music are part of a socio-political strategy that draws attention to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, potentially remaking the borders of ‘the local’ when the genre’s political potential is heard by particular listeners. The use of a Louis Armstrong classic as a climate protest song shows the potential of musical ‘scale jumping’, reorienting audiences to new scales of political contest and musically fusing relations between the experiential and the general, or between particular places and what Glissant calls the ‘Whole-World’. Finally, missionaries’ processes of musical colonialism can be better understood when framed in terms of the cultural production of scalability, with historical attention to the efforts involved in musical scale-building projects that make claims about music’s universal qualities.

Through these varied analyses, I have sought to show how music has been involved in the normalisation or imposition of particular scalar relations, while also contesting dominant scalar systems and hierarchies. In theorising and critically reflecting on ideas of scale in relation to music, the book has drawn attention to something that many music scholars use commonly but generally uncritically. I hope I have demonstrated the value of addressing the role of music in the production of scale, although much more remains to be done: from understanding the role of digitally produced music in the scaling of the digital world, to tracing longer histories and remnants of musical scalability projects. Crucially, I have argued that researchers of music should not just adopt in advance the scalar frames with which music is analysed, nor apply musical scales as metaphors for geographical ones. Instead, the task for music researchers is to explore scale through music, and to appreciate the sophistication of music’s own scale-making practices. After all, we already live in a world whose scales are made by music, but music also has the potential to produce a world scaled otherwise.