Please join us Thursday September 29 for the Center for Ethnomusicology's Fall 2011 Colloquium series, presenting:
New Capitalism, Globalization, and the Commodification of Taste
Prof. Timothy D. Taylor (Musicology/Ethnomusicology, UCLA)
Thursday, September 29, 2011
12.00 - 2.00 pm
Center for Ethnomusicology, Dodge Hall, 701 C
Description:
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, myriad discourses emerged that
attempted to understand the present: was it postmodern, the information
age, the postindustrial era, an era of the new capitalism? Many
influential publications adopted and fleshed out these various
perspectives. "Globalization" as a way of viewing the present and recent
past appeared relatively recently, yet it has come to dominate
considerations of the present, both in and out of academia, eliding some
aspects of other perspectives. This presentation examines what is lost
when globalization as an analytical framework becomes dominant.
"Globalization" as a perspective and related body of theory can help us
understand how musics travel, for example, but is less useful in
explaining what happens once world music has traveled and entered the
Euro-American music industry in an era of the new capitalism. With the
explosion of music available on the Internet and the difficulty of
finding what one wants, what emerges, among other things, is the
importance of what people in the culture industries call "search": the
means of finding music or other cultural products. The importance of
search has resulted in the increasing commodification of taste, both in
the form of music supervisors, who choose music for use in films and
television programs and who have become increasingly influential in the
entertainment industry; and the rise of complex algorithms that help
consumers find music to listen to based on their prior purchases or
listening habits, and those of others.
___________________
Timothy D. Taylor is
a Professor in the Departments of Ethnomusicology and Musicology at the
University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to numerous articles
on various musics, he is the author of Global Pop: World Music, World
Markets (Routledge 1997), Strange Sounds: Music, Technology and Culture
(Routledge 2001), and Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World
(Duke University Press 2007). Two new books will appear in the spring of
2012: Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of
Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio, co-edited with Mark Katz and Tony
Grajeda, published by Duke University Press; and The Sounds of
Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture, published
by the University of Chicago Press.