Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Popular Music
Practice-Based Research

This Element takes a practice-led approach to understanding how culturally different musicians can work productively and ethically.

Toby Martin (Author), Seyed MohammadReza Beladi (Author), Đăng Lan (Author)

9781009454117, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 January 2025

86 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 0.6 cm, 0.265 kg

Cross-cultural collaboration in popular music represents opportunities for the audibility of multiple voices and the creation of new sounds, but it also presents many challenges. These challenges are both musical – that is, how to technically match voices – and ethical – that is, how to negotiate historically entrenched power discrepancies. Practice-based research has recently developed as a field in popular music studies. This burgeoning area has much to offer in terms of new knowledge, based on embodied insights, lived experience, and an arts practice. Through a practitioner-centred account of three projects involving traditional Persian and Vietnamese musicians, and western folk/rock musicians, this Element suggests pragmatic strategies and conceptual frameworks for making pop music with people of different cultural backgrounds.

1. Introduction
2. Practice-based research methodologies
3. Cross-Cultural music making and co-produced research: literature and context
4. Collaborators' backgrounds
5. Project 1: songs from Northam avenue
6. Project 2: song khúc lýợn bay/ two sounds gliding
7. Project 3: I felt the valley lifting
8. Conclusions
References.

Subject Areas: Music [AV]