El Sonido de lo otro: Nuevas Configuraciones de lo étnico en la industria musical.

Abstract

At the beginnings of Ethnomusicology as a science, it is possible to identify a strong interest in translation of other music and delimitation of musical features. This rush, contributed to the stereotyped marking of non–occidental music, producing at least two side–effects. In the first place, it made disappear –in the representational horizon– the urban, artistic, European music, which, even today, is considered in many fields as a “tacit synonym” of the term music.2 In the second place, it initiated a series of complex subject–building processes, linked to several identity effects that necessarily are present in non–urban, non–artistic, and non–european music. The centrality of the term identification in the consumption of what I call here ethnic music, is important to understand how, in the globalized recording market, there is a new esthetic category, that seizes the marginality of this music –and the simultaneous desire/rejection movements that they generate– to promote sales and move the market. This process is constituted by global discourses (multiculturalism, biodiversity), which are part of an ethnopolitic strategy, based on the pacification of difference. However, as long as the marking of otherness is done by using stereotypes, which are fixed and simplifying representations, there is always an open space thru which this ethnic music can emerge to destabilize the regime of representation that classifies them.