Dr Tenley Martin

From 2013-2016, during ethnographic fieldwork on the globalization of flamenco, I visited Jerez de la Frontera in AndalucÍa, Spain for the annual Festival de Jerez – a 10-day flamenco spectacular featuring legends, innovators and up-and-comers of the Spanish scene. In the temperate days of late February, the city hosts performances across multiple venues, as well as lectures and lesson packages. Flamenco, as a culture or ‘art complex’ (Aoyama 2007), encompasses singing, guitar, dancing, percussion and audience involvement. Gestival activities run all day and night. The streets and tavernas are filled with sights and sounds of flamenco and its aficionados discussing festival events. However, despite the festival being a site for the celebration of Spain’s most iconic art form, one notices when wandering the various events that, while most performers and teachers are Spanish, the majority of attendees are foreign – an observation corroborated herein through interviews and participant observation. Some hail from nearby countries in Western Europe, others from as far afield as the Americas, Japan and Taiwan. While this demographic is perhaps surprising, it indicates a larger trend of non-Spaniards having a greater appreciation for flamenco, becoming its primary consumers at home and culture brokers abroad. I was invited to the festival by a British flamenco dancer who attended annually to receive lessons and watch performances. Christine would come to learn new skills and routines and to meet artists and gathering knowledge that informed her teaching, performances and events in Cheshire. I joined Christine and other foreign aficionados on the routes of the festival, enjoying the official performances and classes, as well as tavern jam sessions and peñas. On one memorable occasion, I participated in an impromptu 5am dance-off between a Taiwanese friend and some bakers just as the day’s fresh rolls were coming out of the oven. My interviews and participant observations with Jerez flamenco aficionados suggested that, while locals considered the festival good for business and an appropriate depiction of the art complex, activities were not typically marketed towards the Spanish and were priced higher than local audiences could afford. Subsequent interviews with flamenco practitioners in nearby Spanish cities revealed they would never consider attending because of the price. At one of the world’s biggest flamenco festivals, attended by 20,000 yearly, in a country that has popularised the art complex as a symbol of national identity, why is the target audience mainly foreign? While some visitors are wealthy, curious tourists consuming exoticism, others, such as Christine, have a pre-existing passion and visit to be able to return to their homelands with skills and cultural knowledge. I will later describe these individual non-native culture brokers as ‘cosmopolitan hubs’, uniting Kiwan and Meinhof’s (2011) ‘human hubs’ and Hannerz’s (1990) ‘globalization of cosmopolitanism’ to denote a proclivity towards experiencing aspects of global cultures. Foreign flamenco scenes exist globally and are typically perpetuated by these cosmopolitan hubs rather than by Spanish practitioners. Although foreign interest in flamenco is particularly evident at the Festival de Jerez, it exists across Spain’s various local flamenco scenes: flamenco is a cultural industry sustained by local professionals and foreign fascination. But how have these foreigners developed such an affinity that they travel afar to experience it then bring it back to sustain scenes in their home countries? The answer lies in a complex web of music globalization processes, tourism and assumed or assigned national identities arbitrated by individual culture bearers.

This book provides insight into how flamenco travels, the forms it assumes in new locales, and the reciprocal effects on the original scene.

How can music be used to build a shared sense of place in pluralised, post-industrial locales? Moreover, how can a culturally-significant musical instrument with multiple (and sometimes competing) heritages help develop a shared sense of place in multicultural communities? This article explores these questions through the Bradford Dhol Project (a community music initiative), drawing on qualitative research conducted during dhol workshops with Bradford (U.K.) community groups: Touchstone and ‘Stand and Be Counted’. Bradford is a large post-industrial city marked by economic deprivation and significant cultural diversity, including a sizeable South Asian population. Social issues are exacerbated by it being, to some extent, geographically divided along ethnic lines, generating undercurrents of mistrust and intercommunity tensions. The dhol drum, historically central in Indian and Pakistani musical traditions, has become an aural reminder of ‘home’ for diasporic communities in places like Bradford. Here, it has established new meanings through its prominent presence at public festivals and civic events, not only among the diasporic communities, but also those without historic cultural connections to the instrument. Rather than tracing the dhol’s routes of globalization, this article examines how the instrument’s cultural significance contributes to placemaking by evoking memories of place for those who migrated with it and enabling new meanings formed in the multicultural context of Bradford. Building on Bates’s (2012) call to examine ‘the social life of musical instruments,’ this article demonstrates how culturally significant instruments like the dhol can play an active role in social life by supporting the development of shared cultural and spatial identities. Ultimately, it argues that music—and musical instruments in particular—not only carry traces of their origins but also serve as a tabula rasa through which new collective senses of place can emerge. Developing shared senses of place and culture is a crucial starting point for improving social cohesion.

How can culturally-specific composition using culturally-symbolic instruments broaden the accessibility of Western electroacoustic composition and performance to multicultural audiences? Moreover, how can musical instruments with multiple and competing heritages build connections between disparate communities? This paper / performance explores how the dhol drum can be used in an electroacoustic performance context, as part of The Bradford Dhol Project (a community music initiative), to broaden its visibility amongst disparate multicultural communities.  This new work, composed for dhol and fixed media, is based on rhythmic patterns prevalent in Bhangra music, a British Punjabi popular music style. These patterns are interrupted by, and interact with, composite rhythmic elements borrowed from post-metal repertoire, darbuka patterns, and Hindustani classical rhythmic cycles. The treatment and arrangement of these rhythmic objects (Alvarez, 1989) are informed by compositional practices allied to acousmatic music and working with sound objects. The resulting score acts as a framework to organise more abstract sound material, which is derived largely from recordings of the dhol as well as sounds associated with Bhangra . This approach builds on the composer’s previous fixed media compositions which emerged from specific cultural contexts (Elegeia for voice and fixed media and Granicus for multi-percussion and fixed media) and is situated in a growing lineage of works for percussion and electronics which borrow fromtraditional musics.   Rather than tracing the dhol’s globalisation routes, our project explores how it brings fragmented diasporic communities together. Our aim is to explore the possibility to improve accessibility to electroacoustic music for those from multicultural backgrounds by using culturally-symbolic instrumentation and rhythms that resonate with different communities. Reciprocally, the usage of these culturally-symbolic instruments and rhythms in this format will introduce different audiences to them. Following on from Bates’ (2012) argument for examining ‘the social life of musical instruments’, we explore how the dhol can play an ACTIVE role in social life by fostering cohesion and inclusivity among diverse communities through the lens of electroacoustic composition.

Online music communities are a vital method of genre formation in the 21st century. In a Web 2.0 (or 3.0) virtual space which transcends geographical boundaries, a multitude of artists, audiences, musicians, producers and performers come together to negotiate subcultural capital in a collective capacity. With new subcultural styles, rituals, practices, and cultural disseminations, how can we assess the activities of an online community and their role in the formation of a genre? This 5-year and 6-month (2017-2023) ethnographic study examined the ecosystem of the online synthwave community, a 21st century style of music which both privileges and reimagines 1980s musical and cultural aesthetics. It includes autoethnographic work, with music composition, production and performance being key tenets of the author’s positionality. Paired with an emic viewpoint, this thesis makes visible tacit knowledge of the synthwave creative process, as well as providing rich and experiential subcultural detail about the online community. The research concluded that the synthwave community is an active community of practice with a defined set of musical, stylistic, technological and subcultural rules. By examining the tensions observable within the outputs, interactions, and discourses of this community of practice, as well as through the author’s participation as a creator, the research addresses how online music communities (including creators and audiences) construct and negotiate parameters of an emergent musical style. The research is (to date) the first ethnographic account of the online synthwave community and provides a first-hand telling of its ecosystem as a community of practice. Ultimately, this research traces the genre formation of an ‘internet-based creative practice’ (Born, 2018, p.606) known as synthwave. Key implications of the research findings implore the potential for making connections between communities of practice and genre formation in other areas of popular music, particularly of genres which exist primarily (or were formed initially) online.