Untranslatable Denotations: Notes on Music Meaning Through Cultures

Summary

A Few Starting Points [I. M.]

It is commonly said that music is a preferential tool (or “the” preferential tool) for inter-cultural communication. It is a sort of commonplace that nourishes a rich and diversified amount of activities within the largest cultural contexts. Radio and tv broadcasting, press articles, internet sites, scholastic syllabi, and so on: (the supposed) efficacy of music to cross “cultural borders” is declared as if it were an apodictic fact. This topic is also at the basis of the discourse accompanying the so called “world music”, an ubiquitous phenomenon of the present day that essentially ‘participates in shaping a kind of consumer-friendly multiculturalism, one that follows the market logic of expansion and consolidation’ (Feld 2000, p. 168). Such kinds of “popular beliefs” come from an equivocal concept of music.

In actual fact, it is a very complex question: music sounds can transcend boundaries among world people but some scholarly notions are very useful to understand how music works (and maybe even to facilitate it). Firstly, the nature of what we call music. Due to its ephemerality (Leonardo da Vinci dealt with ‘the unfortunate music that dies immediately after its occurrence’) music is not a collection of objects. It is the pervasive presence of instruments for the recording/reproduction of sound, with the mass media and musical industry, that makes one think ‘of music as a thing – an identifiable art object that can owned by its creator though copyrights and purchased by consumers’ (Torino 2008, p. 24).