Radio and Ethnomusicology: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
BFE One-Day Conference – Saturday 22 October, 2016
University of Edinburgh and the Museum of Communication, Burntisland, Scotland
Registration is now open! Please visit the conference website to explore the full programme and to book.
https://sites.eca.ed.ac.uk/radioethnomusicology/
We encourage you to book early, as space is limited.
Keynote: Timothy D. Taylor (UCLA) — “Circulation, Value, and Exchange in the Movement of Musical Goods”
This presentation is an attempt to move beyond the common metaphor of “flows” to describe how music moves in an era commonly thought of as globalized. “Circulation” seems to be a term in frequent usage these days, referring to people as well as goods, an idea that has a long history going back to Marxist ideas about the movement of money and is still useful with respect to cultural goods such as music. Drawing on Marx and anthropologists who have studied exchange, this paper argues that things circulate because they have value, and circulation therefore manifests as constant exchanges—of time, money, goods, and more—that constantly (re)make social life and relations. Radio serves as a case study in this paper, especially as it plays an important role in the indie rock scene in southern California. Returning to classic theories of the audience as commodity from Dallas Smythe, I argue that Smythe’s conception is predicated in the idea of exchange, and that Smythe’s insights can be extended and updated from radio and other broadcast media to the circulation of digital media today.
Programme Committee:
Dr Annette Davison, Prof Simon Frith, Dr Mark Percival, Dr Tom Wagner, Dr Tom Western
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