Music is a mobile art. When people move to faraway places, whether by choice or by force, they bring their music along. Music creates a meaningful point of contact for individuals and for groups; it can encourage curiosity and foster understanding, and it can preserve a sense of identity and comfort in an unfamiliar or hostile environment. Above all, music continually changes as it crosses cultural, linguistic, and political boundaries. While human mobility and mediation have always shaped music-making, our current era of digital connectedness introduces new creative opportunities and inspiration even as it extends concerns about issues such as copyright infringement and cultural appropriation.
With its innovative multimodal approach, Music on the Move invites readers to listen and engage with many different types of music as they read. The text introduces a variety of concepts related to music’s travels—with or without its makers—including colonialism, migration, diaspora, mediation, propaganda, copyright, and hybridity. The case studies represent a variety of musical genres and styles, Western and non-Western, concert music, traditional music, and popular music. Over one hundred audiovisual examples throughout the book demonstrate the application of particular concepts, and six interactive digital maps visually present music’s global reach.
Highly accessible, jargon-free, and media-rich, Music on the Move is suitable for students as well as general-interest readers. The open-access ebook edition hosted on the University of Michigan’s Fulcrum platform includes embedded audiovisual musical examples and live links to examples on other streaming platforms; all other ebook editions feature live links to Fulcrum and other platforms. The print edition provides Fulcrum digital object identifiers (DOIs) and URLs for all online examples as well as static versions of the digital maps. A bibliography of selected sources offers direction for further exploration of musical repertories and styles.
