Shane McMahon 'Enculturation and Extinction. Two Perspectives on a Deep History of MusicTwo Perspectives on a Deep History of Music'

Wednesday, February 13, 2019 - 16:00
Room 1.26 First Floor Iontas

The steady extinction of indigenous musical traditions over the past century poses new and multiple challenges to historical understanding and motivates the development of an interdisciplinary framework which is global in perspective and extends into the deep past. Drawing on work in musicology, anthropology and archaeology, this paper will outline an approach to the construction of such a framework, focusing on the core, interlinked concepts of musical enculturation (or the gradual embedding of specific musical practices within a given cultural, historical and geographical context) and musical extinction, understood here as the attrition, through globalisation, of non-western musical practices. Image courtesy of H. Jensen, University of Tuebingen.