Music in a foreign land

If the war-torn homeland becomes a threat to life or there is no longer enough money to live on, fleeing is often the only choice. But what happens in the other country? In other words, where refugees are cut off from their own culture? And in even worse cases, where they are not welcome?

These are extremely important questions of cultural policy that Music and migration is treated. Music has always been a defining identity factor. It is therefore not surprising that migrants or refugees continue to listen to and cultivate the music of their homeland - be it folk songs, rap in their own language or pentatonic tunes from their own cultural area. If you read the essays in this extensive anthology, there is something else: music alleviates suffering and helps people to deal with trauma. On page 215, Anna Papaeti and M. J. Grant report on a Syrian refugee. When he arrives by boat in Greece, he sings "a mixture of lament and prayer", addressed to the sea, which "may it stop killing children in its waves".

Such drastic situations are only a Aspect of the highly complex topic Music and migration. In addition, there are questions and problems of the "multicultural society", aspects of cultural appropriation, including the currently strange field of post-colonialism. The editors of the thick, 746-page anthology did well to explain "key terms" in lexicon style, not only "postcolonialism", but also many terms borrowed from ethnology or sociology, such as "agency", "embodiment" or "liminality". The field of research is fundamentally dependent on interdisciplinary cooperation, and therefore tends to be located more in "cultural studies" than in the more solid field of musicology. This makes it challenging to read in places. On the one hand, due to problems that are difficult to grasp and, on the other, due to research methods that are barely established.

Nevertheless, there is a lot to take away after reading it. Among other things, the insight that musical acculturation processes, i.e. the interpenetration of different cultures, are completely normal. Concepts of "own" and "foreign" are only auxiliary constructions - and this also exposes those patriots, nationalists and sometimes overly self-confident Europeans whose calls for a "dominant culture" or cultural "purity" are at best nonsensical abbreviations. As Katarzyna Grebosz-Haring and Magnus Gaul write on page 25? Plato already discussed the phenomenon of acculturation. And that was in the 3rd century BC!

Music and Migration, Volume 3, a book on theory and methods, edited by Wolfgang Gratzer, Nils Grosch, Ulrike Präger and Susanne Scheiblhofer, 746 p., € 69.90, Waxmann, Münster 2023, ISBN 978-3-8309-4630-4, open access