Pop Music and Digitization: Philippe Le Guern and Emanuelle Olivier -- April 19, 12-3PM

The Center for Ethnomusicology Colloquium Series presents:

Pop Music and Digitization

featuring:
Emmanuelle Olivier
and
Philippe Le Guern

April 19, 2013
12pm-3pm
Center for Ethnomusicology
701C Dodge Hall
Free and Open to the Public

Islamic Pop Music in Mali: Constructing a Local Modernity
Emmanuelle Olivier
National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Centre of Research of Arts and Langage (CRAL, CNRS-EHESS), Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), France

Emmanuelle Olivier is an ethnomusicologist, Senior Researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. She is member of the Centre of Research of Arts and Langage (CRAL, CNRS-EHESS) and teaches ethnomusicology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). She is currently directing the ANR program « Musical Creation, Circulation and Identity Market in a Global Context » (http://www.globalmus.net) and is the author of a book entitled Musiques au monde. La tradition au prisme de la création (Delatour, 2012).
 

The French Recording Industry: Between Defense of Cultural Exception, Anti-Piracy Interventionism and New Export Strategies
Philippe Le Guern
University of Nantes (France), Centre Atlantique de Philosophie, Centre de recherche sur les Arts et le Langage, EHESS

Philippe Le Guern is Professor in popular culture and media studies at the University of Nantes (France). He is a member of the Centre Atlantique de Philosophie and associate member of the Centre de recherche sur les Arts et le Langage at the EHESS. He has edited a number of studies on popular culture which cover fan studies, music and its audiences, music and heritage, including for example Philippe Le Guern et Hugh Dauncey (dir.), Stereo: Comparative Perspectives on the Sociological Study of Popular Music in France and Britain, Ashgate, 2010 / Philippe Le Guern (dir.), Musique et technologies numériques, Réseaux, 2012 / Philippe Le Guern (dir.), Patrimonialiser les musiques actuelles et populaires, Questions de Communication, 2eme semestre 2012. He is currently one of the researchers in a French national research council project on the effects of digital technologies on music in everyday life.

Abstracts:

Islamic Pop in Mali: Constructing a Local Modernity (Dr. Olivier)
In Mali, as in all West African Muslim countries and beyond in the Sufi Muslim area, panegyrics to Mohammad Prophet, saints, ulemas or other powerful people have constitued, for several hundred years, effective forms of religious proselytism which inform, educate and impregnate the collective image. Approximately ten years ago, these panegyrics changed, passing from songs linked to a religious elite of well-read men, to a genre that constitutes a real Islamic Pop Music. This new musical genre, called zikiri (from Arabic dhikr), takes its sources of inspiration in the griot music as well as in the coupé-décalé of the Ivory Coast, reggae, rap… or the Christian songs, while sung in lyrics in Bambara, the Malian national language. This is an urban phenomenon that is popular among young people. At the same time, zikiri songs enter a moral economy and a mediatized entertainment industry (threw K7, VCDs, videos clips, phone ringings, but also radio and TV transmissions, and Internet). Changes also occur in the status of the musicians who become professionalized, and in the manufacturing process of the music carried out within recording studios before being performed for an audience. In Mali, zikiri are mainly carried out at the time of Mawlid (commemoration of the birth of the Prophet), which has been constituted since 2006 by the Malian State as an official national ceremony. I will specifically question  this new popularization and culturalization of the religious sphere starting from the example of the “Mawlid Festival” organized for the past two years by the Muslim Community of Sufis. We will thus see what this process implies and renews, in terms of networks (local and global), infrastructures, services, standards (social and aesthetic), values and actors. I will finally question the concept of “multiple modernities” (Eisenstadt) through an analysis of the couple newness vs innovation, which will lead me to define a “local modernity” whose popular religious sphere constitutes one of the bases.
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The French Recording Industry: between Defense of Cultural Exception, Anti-Piracy Interventionism and new export strategies (Dr. Le Guern)
This paper discusses various features of the French music industry, focusing particularly on whether the French recording industry is indeed characterised by specific practices and methods of organisation which set it apart from international norms and structures, or whether, in contrast, the French market is undergoing a process of growing integration through a model of industry organisation and structure which is progressively destroying its national characteristics. Our first section will contextualise the French music industry historically and sociologically before moving on to discuss the main developments and drivers of the sector in the current digital era; thirdly, we will present and discuss the main measures implemented by public policy of various kinds in favour of music and those who create and commercialise it, as well as considering the resistance (including amongst musicians themselves) which has arisen most recently to legislation (based on a principle of repression and graduated sanctions for those who pirate cultural products) bearing on 'artistic creativity and the Web', and its efficacy in terms of educating the general public about the negative effects of piracy.