Louisa Theresa Hutzler
Abstract
Musical practice in transcultural ensembles demonstrates how social change brought about by migration is perceived by musicians, both those with and without a migration background, and how this is translated into processes of musical change. When examining the interrelationships between artistic interaction and social structures within these ensembles, music provides a unique avenue for the theoretical understanding of these processes. Examining the artistic work of transcultural music groups raises, on the one hand, questions regarding translation between musical systems and the handling of cultural parameters within musical styles. On the other hand, the focus is on the significance of the participants’ culture-specific backgrounds and musical experiences. Drawing on my ethnographic research into multi-ethnic ensembles, I describe how these questions are negotiated in the concrete moments of music-making, thereby engaging with a new generation of ‘world musicians’ who are shifting the boundaries of style and genre, and whose musical expression is also linked to current postcolonial discourses.
Ethnographic methods such as interviews and participant observation during rehearsals, together with the musical analysis of the syncretic musical forms composed or arranged by the musicians themselves, provide insight into the significance of transcultural encounters in music against the backdrop of artistic participation. Of particular interest here is also the interplay between different forms of musical socialisation, ways of working on pieces, organising rehearsals and recording music. Insights into the role of the participants’ cultural roots within such structures allow important conclusions to be drawn about the construction of cultural differences and peculiarities and their significance for artistic work. Using specific musical pieces, it is thus possible to trace how the engagement with the cultural roots of musical styles – and the associated original concepts of sound and elements of musical language – are placed within various contexts of meaning through the respective cultural attributions. These are, to a large extent, the result of musical negotiation and interpretation. In this context, alongside the question of the discursive embedding of these ensembles in the public sphere – who determines the concepts, who allocates the roles, and who holds the ‘authority to interpret’? – there is also the question of the significance of cultural mobility for these musical processes of change, which reflect a cultural transformation within migration societies.
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