The first essay to be discussed is Sara Cohen’s study on “Identity, Place and the ‘Liverpool Sound’” (1994). She is interested in defining the term ‘Liverpool Sound’ and her study is a detailed discussion of what the term can mean. Cohen describes the term as being commonly used within and outside of the Merseyside region over the past twenty-five to thirty years, which implies a certain authentic relationship between the city and its music. Cohen examines how Liverpool rock musicians, journalists, and residents describe their music, and relates these discussions to socioeconomic and political forces. Her conclusions of the term came from those three sources along with some secondary resources.
Cohen’s main source of information for the study occurred during the autumn of 1990 where about 15 to 20 young rock musicians and other people who were particularly interested in or involved with music where invited on a weekly basis to form an informal discussion group as part of the project to investigate the notions of locality in relation to music and music making. Participants were asked to consider if there was such a thing as the ‘Liverpool Sound’ and if so what it was and also how a city may become associated with the particular sound. The discussions on the subject where wide ranging, the majority of people began questioning Cohen on her thesis that there was a ‘Liverpool Sound’, talking of it as a media construction, or denying the notion that where a band or artist came from influenced their reception of the music. However, Cohen found people often contradicted themselves when discussing the subject.
Cohen compared Liverpool to other cities, mainly using secondary data, describing national sounds in relation to the ‘Liverpool Sound’, including Manchester, Bristol, Scotland and London. She goes on to say that Liverpool was placed on the world map by the Beatles and the so called ‘Liverpool Sound’, making a link where if one artist makes it, there is often then a number of artists being signed from that one area, resulting in a media construction. This was evident in Liverpool in the 1960s.
One of her main principals was the relationship between music and the locality in Liverpool. She believed the geographical variations in ones background, culture and influences of musicians, although reflected in their music, also help to construct particular places and the ways in which people conceptualise them. She found from her various discussions and interviews that the locals believed there were different sounds coming from different parts of Liverpool. The fringes of Liverpool contrasted with the central musical practices, where the latter tend to be more creative and relaxed about the music making and less competitive. Also that the Toxteth area had its own black sound which is not often referred to when looking at Liverpool’s music. She believes there is an authenticity link with the connection of particular artists with particular places that will identify them with roots, and presents them as real people. This was spoken about in the discussions, where the band China Crisis is used as an example, one member thought Liverpool’s geographical features such as broad expanses of sky and its changeable climate where represented through the band’s music song titles and lyrics with ‘Comes a Raincloud’ and ‘Northern Sky.
John Baily‘s essay on “The Role of Music in the Creation of an Afghan National Identity, 1923-73” (1994) is the second essay from the book to be discussed. Baily’s fieldwork was conducted between 1973 and 1977 in Herat and Kabul. His study however starts from 1923 as Baily believed that this time scale covered a modern era in Afghan History. Baily explains that for Afghanistan, there is little in musical historical documents and the musical past is open to speculations and assertion, which is left to assume he uses primary and secondary resources to gather his information.
The essay focuses on the role of music in the creation of Afghan’s national identity, and he found it is but one part of a wider pattern of music change related to the process of modernism and modernisation in Afghanistan. Baily demonstrates that Afghanistan mixes different elements of music from neighbours while still maintaining its own musical uniqueness. This occurred due to the mass movements of people in and out of Afghanistan who became in contact with other types of music. The interactions with local music in these places led to various instances of interculturalism.
Radio broadcasting was clearly of cultural importance in the creation and distribution of the popular forms of Afghan music. Baily also had contact with an historian Professor S.Q. Reshtia, who had the experience of being the Director of Radio Kabul during 1940 and 1945 who read over and made comments about Baily’s work confirming if it was correct. The radio broadcasting in Kabul has been of crucial importance in the creation and dissemination of popular forms of Afghan national music. The Afghan popular music originated in response to the need to create music suitable for radio broadcasting. Baily describes in his study how Tajik and Pashtun musical styles were moulded and could even say improved with the help of Afghan ustads, (master musicians) who were educated in Hindustani performance practice to create musiqi-ye melli (national music). The new music brought together Dari texts, Pashtun musical style, and Hindustani theoretical concepts and terminology, which embraces both ghazal, the national classical vocal form, and killwali, mass-mediated Afghan popular music.
Throughout this essay it is apparent that the various regionalized, ethnic threads of Afghan musical culture, particularly Pashtun, Hindustani, and Tajik music, were entwined in the interests of designing an Afghan national music, and maintaining a important national Afghan music history that has developed from the origins of Hindustani classical music in the North Afghanistan city of Balkh. It demonstrates how music played a significant role in expressing and creating an Afghan national identity and raises the issue of internationally in the construction of Afghan music.
In contrast to Baily’s essay, Cohen’s is less ethnographic and analytical, and more historical and descriptive in approach. Although the theoretical concepts supporting her article are convincing and persuasive, a differentiation exists between this study and Baily’s as he uses a broader analysis of his material such as musical examples like the ghazal, where Cohen focuses more on what people say about the music (much of this is from secondary sources) than on musical performance itself.
Baily places Afghan music in its social, historical and geographical contexts to produce an analysis of how it is used and how the people who produce it relate to it and each other. In contrast Cohen describes Liverpool’s music as revolving around particular issues regarding money, class, specific dimensions of time and space and media constructions of the city. All of the issues involve distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ relating Liverpool to the rest of Britain. Discussions of the ‘Liverpool Sound’ resulted in debates over the ‘Manchester’ vs the ‘Liverpool Sound’. The ‘Wirral’ vs the ‘Liverpool Sound’, the ‘North Liverpool’ vs the ‘South Liverpool Sound’, where Cohen describes Liverpool as having an individual and personalised sound. Baily’s article in contrast was about different neighbouring sounds being brought together.
The topic of landscape touches on both essays. In Baily’s case it is relevant in his study as it has been developed in a combination of ideas about “preservation, identity and nation to indicate the extent to which a particular place or location may shape or be shaped by cultural as well as economic considerations” (Beard & Gloag, 2005, p.100). For Cohen, whose essay is about the consumption of space in a city, citing streets names and describing other geographical features of urban landscapes such as parks, bridges, and so on is a component in claiming identity and authenticity in music. This is seen in the title of the song ‘Penny Lane (1967) by The Beatles, and the discussion on the band China Crisis and there song titles and lyrics.
Cohen recognises in her essay that there are many ways of investigating music in relation to place, and since her paper focuses on the issue of identity and the construction of locality through music, her study illustrates how difficult it is for ethnomusicologists to make sense of people's contradictory and often ambiguous remarks about why music is significant for a particular community. Where in contrast Baily takes an ethnographic approach of watching what has happened to Afghanistan musically, it demonstrates clearly how music, as an experiential phenomenon, possesses the ability not only to challenge boundaries, but to transform them to accommodate the parameters of changing surroundings and circumstances.
Both studies have been on unrelated topics of how place has influenced work on popular music, and the significance of space and place in relation to national identity, but have both been in relation to music and place. As discussed earlier on Stokes’s demonstration of how music and place can be seen as a vague category, from analysing different approaches it has shown how music is socially meaningful. Both essays have used different methodological approaches where one is very historical and descriptive and the other is more ethnographic. However, both approaches work for their individual study, and from the point made at the beginning of Stokes introduction, it is clear that no one approach should be taken but that it varies between studies.
Bibliography
Baily, J. (1994) The Role of Music in the Creation of an Afghan National Identity, 1923-73. In Stokes, M. (ed.) ‘Ethnicity, Identity and Music: the musical construction of place’. Oxford: Berg. pp.45-60
Beard, D and Gloag, K. (2005) Musicology: The Key Concepts. Abingdon: Routledge
Cohen, S. (1994) Identity, Place and the ‘Liverpool Sound’. In Stokes, M. (ed.) ‘Ethnicity, Identity and Music: the musical construction of place’. Oxford: Berg. pp.117-134
DeNora, T. (1997) Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in
Vienna, 1792-1803 . Berkeley and London: University of California Press.
Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Kerman, J. (1985) Musicology. London: Fontana.
Seeger, A. (1987) Why Suya Sing: A musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stokes, M. (ed.) (1994) Ethnicity, Identity and Music: the musical construction of place. Oxford: Berg.
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