Thoughts on Music and Migration

Abstract

Music is always significant to human beings everywhere. Such diverse social phenomena as religion, power structure, class structure or family relations are to some extent expressed, mirrored, reinforced, exhibited—or even flaunted—through the social use of sound. And just like all these other social phenomena, music is always in a state of flux, with new generations of music-makers, audiences, technologies and social contexts spurring new musical creations and forms, and adapting or supplanting old ones. Migration is a similarly universal phenomenon. The history of humanity is a history of migrations. Migratory peoples tend to take their music along with them, especially if there are sufficient numbers of them to sustain its practice in a social context, and even if they do not , that fact in itself can help us to understand some important features of the originating and host societies, and the role of the migrants in relation to them. The study of music in migratory contexts may thus be crucial to the study of musical cultures in general. The experience of migration does not make music any less relevant in the lives of the emigrants, and the study of musical attitudes, tastes, practices (and their progressive reshaping over time) may help us to understand how easy or difficult it is for migrants to strike a balance between assimilation, co-habitation (with other groups) and the maintenance of distinctive cultural traits.