Isha's blog

  The study of identity and its relationship to musical practice is relatively new in American ethnomusicological studies. The relationship between music and identity involves many other subjects such as individual agency, urban or popular music, gender, migration, nationalism and globalization (Rice, 2007, p. 19). Going back in time, the very first article published in the famous journal of Ethnomusicology , using the word “identity” in its title, was written in 1982. Since Christopher Waterman’s article “I’m a Leader, Not a Boss: Social Identity and Popular music in Ibadan, Nigeria”, identity became a regular subject in the journal of Ethnomusicology and one of the most important areas in the field   (Rice, 2007, pp. 18-19).   But what is identity and how does it relate to ethnomusicology?   Defining identity is not an easy task. The term itself may have first appeared during the 1950’s through the work of psychologist Erik Erikson, who studied the developmental st...

  Music is social, dynamic and interpersonal. As musical cultures are endangered by globalization, it’s now more important than ever to document and analyze musical diversity and consider the way people and cultures interact with it and its environment. Luckily nowadays cross-cultural studies are focusing on the way listeners perceive music of other cultures, its structures, similarities and differences (Stevens, 2012, p. 654).   Because of processes of enculturation and people’s acquired perceptual habits, it is always a challenge to compare music from different regions of the world. How can similarity or complexity be measured without the bias of a particular cultural perspective? Recent studies have tried to focus on the development of perceptual habits from exposure to a particular music environment (Stevens, 2012, pp. 659-660).   Aspects like cultural knowledge can also influence musical expectancies in the context of an unfamiliar musical scale system. In the West, ...