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)

9781009358248, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 January 2025

86 pages
23 x 15.1 x 0.5 cm, 0.142 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]