The Music-Culture as a
World of Music
MUSI 3721Y
University of Lethbridge, Calgary Campus
John Anderson

The Music-Culture
• Music is universal but its meaning is not
• By culture we mean the whole way of life of a people, learned and transmitted from one generation to the next
• We use the term musicculture to refer to a group of people’s total involvement with music
• Not all music-cultures have a word for “music”

A Music-Culture Model
• A model rooted in music through performance
• Music
• Performers
• Audience
• Time and space
• Music’s affect is its emotional impact, whatever makes you assent, smile, grimace, nod, sway or dance
• Performance has agreed-on rules and procedures

A Music-Culture Model
• Community is the group that carries the traditions and norms of performance
• Time and space becomes memory and history in our music-culture model
• Musical analysis is finding patterns in the sound by breaking the music into parts and determining how the parts function in the whole

Components of a Music-Culture
• Music and the Belief
System
• Aesthetics of Music
• Contexts for Music
• History of Music

Social Organization of Music
• Social organization refers to how a group of people divides, arranges, or ranks itself
• Sometimes resembles social divisions within the group
• Sometimes goes against the broad cultural grain

Repertories of Music
• Style
• Scale, mode, melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, dynamics
• Genres
• Vocal vs. instrumental?
• Texts
• The words to a song

Repertories of Music
• Composition
• How does music enter the repertory?
• Transmission
• How is music learned?
• Movement
• A whole range of physical activity accompanies music

Material Culture of Music
• Material culture refers to the tangible, physical objects that a culture produces
• The most obvious example are musical instruments
• Sheet music is material culture too
• Electronic media?
• Radio, compact discs,
MP3s, television?

• Music cultures are dynamic, not static
• Constantly changing to outside pressures
• It changes to suit the expressive and emotional desires of humankind
• Synergy vs. hegemony

• What is music?
• How can music affect culture?
• How can culture affect music?
• How is music considered as a behaviour?

• How can we better understand different music when we compare them to languages?
• Sincere there are many similarities in musical instruments throughout the world, could there have been patterns of cultural diffusion?
• How might they have operated?