Cultural Music Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Cultural Music - Essay Example What we are going to explore in this paper are the values, cultural music uphold, its historical significance, where it came from and the factors that distinguishes the cultural music from that of popular culture. We would put light across factors like religious rituals, social rituals, materialism and how it developed. Cultural value becomes a relative idea today because it is everywhere turned into something quantifiable, as the principle of exchange value (i.e., price) is extended into all spheres of life. Music when considered on a broad spectrum, is an art, and the value of art becomes a shifting term in an economy of cultural meanings, defined by its relation to other signifying elements in the cultural system, not to anything "real" to which it might ultimately refer. But when it comes to musical judgments, cultures are never explored in the context of social values. Though the formation of "taste cultures" has always been socially defined. Participation in certain genres of music say, grand opera, street ballads, or rural folk music was historically determined by a person's social position, not by a purely independent aesthetic choice. Indeed, from a sociological perspective, cultural taste is always a social category rather than an aesthetic one; it refers to the way we use cultural judgments as social "currency, " to mark our social positions. This may be less clear today, since contemporary society is characterized by the fragmentation of older taste cultures and the proliferation of new ones. In this context, cultural musical transactions take place with increasing rapidity hence the heating up of the cultural economy and its rapid turnover of new products. Not only are taste cultures themselves shifting, but people now tend to move between them with greater ease. These factors contribute to a sense of the relativity of any single position. Contemporary musical choices enable us to make selection from among umpteen choices, such choices refer to the pluralism, and the effect of that plurality is inevitably to confirm that, in matters of musical judgment, the individual can be the only authority. (Johnson, 2002, p. 7) Musician Perception Musicians are perceived as "speaking on behalf" of the cultures they perform. As Harnish says, "For those of us teaching in geographic areas of little diversity, we are charged with or charge ourselves with the task of representing the music and culture of the ensemble". (Solis, 2004, p. 14) Debate about music, even technical debate between musicians, has always been an attempt to wrestle with this conundrum: music flows from individuals to other individuals and yet seems to be shaped by supra individual forces. The basic model of that conundrum does not change. Music teachers, however, are the only