Thomas Burkhalter

Local Music Scenes and Globalization - Transnational Platforms in Beirut

1 Globalization and Digitalization in Music

The accelerated processes of globalization and digitalization have revolutionized

music making on many levels. Austrian music sociologists Kurt Blaukopf (1996) and
Alfred Smudits (2002) use the term media-morphoses to describe in detail major
changes from the first recordings on cylinder phonographs to the advent of
cassettes and CDs to the complete digitalization of musical production from the
1980s onwards. The digital media-morphosis alone continually brings revolutionary
changes. Throughout the world, musicians find new ways to produce music at low
cost and to promote it globally. Chris Anderson (2006:5757) emphasizes the fact
that the universe of musical content is growing faster than ever. He lists three main
forces that have led to this situation: the democratization of the tools of production
(new and cheaper computer hardware and software); the democratization of the
tools of distribution (e.g., CD-Baby); and new mediators that connect supply and
demand (e.g., Weblogs, Facebook, YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify).
Anderson describes today's music market as a confusing mosaic of a million
minimarkets and microstars: Increasingly, the mass market is turning into a mass of
niches. The geographical location of a musician, label, or distributor becomes a
minor factor, it seems. Thomas Friedman (2005), among many others, highlights
the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. It is some
of these individuals, musicians from Beirut in this case, that this book is about.

SAMPLE: BEIRUT AFRICA, ASIA, AND LATIN AMERICA

Musicians from Beijing to Tijuana, from Istanbul to Johannesburg, mix and

manipulate local and global sounds and ideas within their music. They network with
artists and multipliers (e.g., curators, producers, journalist, and scholars) worldwide
and experiment with new ways of producing, distributing, and selling music. This
recent music from Africa, Asia, and Latin America is progressively reaching Euro-
American reception platforms and is being discussed by ethnomusicologists,
popular music scholars, journalists, and bloggers with increased interest. Style-
wise, the sample is broad: commercially successful styles of pop music like
reggaeton (Marshall, Rivera, and Hernandez 2009) and kwaito (Steingo 2005;
Swartz 2008), and electronic music styles like kuduro (Alisch and Siegert 2011),
nortec (Madrid 2008), baile funk (Stcker 2009; Lanz et al. 2008), shangaan
electro, or cumbia electronica form the popular end of the spectrum. The
experimental end offers African, Asian, and Latin American musique concrte, free
improvisation, noise music, and sound art (e.g., Wallach 2008).
In the Arab world, beyond Beirut, we find a large number of upcoming musicians.
On CDs (e.g., from the label 100copies) and platforms like SoundCloud, we find
them experimenting with the noises of Cairo and electronic music (e.g., Mahmoud
Refat, Ramsi Lehner, Adham Hafez, Hassan Khan, Kareem Lotfy, and Omar
Raafat). Using Casio PT minikeyboards, Kareem Lotfy and Omar Raafat mix noise
with distorted, psychedelic-sounding Egyptian melodies. Mohammed Ragabalias
Machine Eat Manworks with analogue synthesizers. He defines his mixture of
Arabic voice, flute samples, drums, psychedelic synthesizer movements, and
electronics as Egyptronica. Further, musicians range from pioneers like Halim El-
Dabh to composers in Syria, rappers in Palestine, and metal musicians in Egypt.
The list includes Nassim Maalouf with his quartertone trumpet and many other
contemporary musicians (see Burkhalter, Dickinson, and Harbert 2013).
In addition, there are musicians of Arab origin in Europe and the US who frequently
network with musicians in the Arab world. Mahmoud Turkmani, a Lebanese
musician and composer living in Switzerland, experiments with Egyptian takht
ensembles, video art, and film. In his piece Ya Sharr Mout (Son of a Bitch), he
harshly criticizes both the Europeanization of Arabic music and the extreme
commercialism of Lebanese postwar mainstream culture. The hope of many
musicians, NGOs, and other actors in the Middle East is that his and other
musicians' struggles for more representation (and against censorship and physical
aggression) will celebrate more successes after the Arab Spring of 2011 and 2012.
Despite the many differences between these musical styles, some commonalities
can be clearly identified. In this book, I argue that these musicians offer alternative
musical positions and try to fight old ethnocentric Euro-American perceptions of
their home countries in, for example, challenging and mixing up ideas about
culture, place, locality, tradition, and/or authenticity in music.
In Europe and the US not many years ago, small niche audiences listened
exclusively to music from the Arab world, Africa, Asia, or Latin America. Specialists
were primarily interested in Arabic maqam music and small Arab takht ensembles
or sufi singers, whereas others were drawn to the famous Arabic singers Umm
Kulthum, Asmahan, or Fairuz and Algerian or Franco-Algerian ra by Khaled or
Cheb Mami (Schade- Poulsen 1999), or they listened to what is often referred to as
oriental jazz, crossover, or world fusion. The latter include musicians like Rabih
Abou Khalil, Anouar Brahem, and Dhafer Youssef, among others. This variety of
music was (and is) often categorized as world music by record industries and
media. British record producers invented it as a marketing label in the 1980s (e.g.,
Erlmann 1995, Taylor 1997, Mitchell 1996, Broughton 2006, Binas- Preisendrfer
2010), and the goal was to diversify the Euro-American market in order to sell more
music.
Consequently, to this day, world music is based on musical difference and
otherness at its core. Due to this focus, the world music catalogue for the Arab
world contains the music mentioned earlier, but few of the current rock, punk, metal,
and electronic music, or electro-acoustic experiments and musique concrte,
despite the fact that this very music has been produced not only in Beirut, but also
in other Middle Eastern, African, Asian, and Latin American cities for many years.
After a long period of nonrepresentation, musicians of these genres have now
started to perform on various Euro-American reception platformswith the help,
support, and initiative of mostly small European and US-based producers and
labels (some of them from within the world music networks).
Many new supporters of this emerging music ignored music from Africa, Asia, and
Latin America for a long time mainly because it fell into the category world
music. World music to them sounded too cleanly produced, too much of a
middle-class taste, too boring, or too clich (interviews and discussions by
author 19942012).
Today, many authors of blogs, disc jockeys, and curatorsthe multipliers of the
presentare considering a multitude of new and trendy terms to categorize these
upcoming styles, for example, global ghettotech (Marshall 2007),1 shanty house
theory,2 worldtronica, or ghettopop. In some of my articles I use the term World
Music 2.0 (Burkhalter 2010)and I do so for various reasons. Many people
including mehope that these latest tracks, songs, sound montages, and noises
from the Arab world, Asia, Africa, and Latin America contain revolutionary
meanings: That the old model of center and periphery is less valid than it ever was;
that we are living in a world of multiple, interwoven modernities (Eisenstadt 2000).
In other words, modernity emerges polycentrically through exchanges between the
global North and the global South (Kolland 2010). We hope that these musics
will support claims by social and cultural scientists that declare the one-sided
theories of modernization to be unsound (Randeria and Eckert 2009). Whereas
terms like modernity, global North, and global South are debated upon and
deconstructed in academics, they are still in use in cultural networks and markets.
The discussion around discrepancies between academic theory and daily practice
is one of the tensions that run like a thread through this book.

2 Theoretical Frame

Ethnomusicology, popular music studies, and musicology find it hard to research

the rapid developments in these and similar musics and music circles. Tagg and
Clarida (2003) argue that the various academic disciplines that research music
cannot keep pace with rapid technological shifts. Digital revolutions and the new
possibilities of producing and distributing music demand new methodological and
theoretical approaches. One goal of this book is to put forward a methodological
approach that analyzes music and music making from miscellaneous perspectives.
The approach is inductive, built on my many years of participant observation in
music and cultural markets. Overall, I work with a mix of theories from
ethnomusicology, pop and media studies, culture studies, and social anthropology.

FROM MUSIC MAKING TO TRANSNATIONAL MEDIA PERFORMANCES

Media channels are crucial in all aspects of music making. They regulate contact
and access to other musicians, organizers, funders, and fans. Musicians in Beirut
receive information on the latest trends in their specific niche music genres faster
than ever before. Whereas in the 1990s metal albums were imported through the
port of Kaslik, or brought in by friends or family members by plane, today's
musicians can listen to their favorite music from abroad via the Internet. Their
knowledge about music and their production and distribution strategies show clearly
how closely music making is connected through media worldwide. That Lebanon
still has one of the slowest Internet speed rates worldwide does not derogate this
fact. Many of the Beiruti musicians download all possible tracks from their favorite
sites the moment they step into a zone with fast wireless Internet access abroadI
observed this many times. Their musics become media products, fixed on CD, LP,
or cassette, or as media files (e.g., WAV, MP3). These media products include
cover images (with pictures, fonts, and graphic design), titles, logos, and
descriptions.
Further, video clips, remixes, posters, websites, promotion pictures, and interviews
appear on a diversity of old and new media ranging from newspapers and
magazines to blogs, SoundCloud, and YouTube. They are not side products of the
music; rather, they intensify its aesthetical approach and vision (in the best cases),
and they help promote both music and musician. Similar to concert performances
and DJ sets in front of audiences, these media products can be defined as
transnational media performances. These performances include all elements of
Christofer Jost's definition of media as: carriers and transmitters of data (and
information); as technical means of communication; as means to create standing;
as technical dispositions; and as independent outdifferentiated systems of function
(2011:7). Furthermore, they fit Rolf Grossmann's definition of musicians, which
focuses not on traditional instruments, but on the laptop as an increasingly
important device for many (if not all) tasks. Grossmann highlights the changes
laptop culture brought to music: It is a new mode of musicianship: fusing self-
research, composition, innovation, performance and distribution in a single
technological device connected to digital networks (2008:9). Many of the musicians
in this book combine multiple activities; they are producers, interpreters, activists,
historians, salesmen, and networkers and many of them own an up-to-date
laptop, either PC or Mac.
I use the term platform whenever I speak of where these media products appear:
on a local stage in Beirut, on an international stage in London, on a media platform
like SoundCloud or YouTube, or in a computer game. Possibilities are huge
certainly new platforms open up at the moment of writing. With their media
products, musicians perform on several of these platforms simultaneously. They
trim their media products to fitor they challenge consumption on these platforms.
Similar to concert performances, where musicians reflect on effective set lists or
announcements, they perform strategically (and more and less knowledgeably) on
various local and transnational platforms. It is the musicians' strategic use of these
platforms that I intend to research. Plus I try to show the interrelation between the
production of media products and the reception on these possible platforms.
German media and pop scholar Christoph Jacke (2009:144) splits pop music into
four main domains: production, distribution, reception, and further processing. This
book is divided along these lines: Parts II and III deal primarily with production and
distribution, whereas Part V focuses on reception and further processing. The
domain production includes motives of musicians and producers. It looks at the
production processes and at the aesthetics of production. It does further highlight
economical aspects. The domain distribution observes the role of public relations
(PR), advertising, and the impact of media channels (e.g., TV channels, radio
stations, blogs). It looks at distribution processes and at aesthetics of distribution.
The domain reception looks at the various groups of recipients and their motives
and reception aesthetics. The domain further processing observes all the further,
often nonmusical, appearances of a specific media product.
I work with a broad definition of music thatbesides melody, rhythm, and pitch
includes noise(s), the sonic, and sound. The approach is linked to sound studies,
which assume that the sound characteristics of a track lead into the middle of music
making as a process of action, communication, and meaning (see Binas 2008:11).
In sound, we hear the contradictory aesthetical, social, and economical interests
and possibilities of the actors involved with the production. By working on sound,
we come to the crossroads between the cultural, the social, and the aesthetical.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
MULTISITED AVANTGARDES OR WORLD MUSIC 2.0?

From my experience, interview data collected with musicians and the analysis of
their media products often reveal different results. It is this gap between empirical
data and the actual analysis of the media products that needs to be filled. My main
research questions keep the media products of these musicians from Beirut at the
center of interest:
Which musical and nonmusical spheres of influence affect the music making of
these musicians from Beirut?
How do these spheres of influence affect them: Are they binding and inspiring, or do
they offer positioning options or playing opportunities?
How do these interactions between these various spheres of influence become
inscribed in their media products?
Approaching music in this way shows that many actors with different policies,
strategies, and knowledge are involved in the process of music making (Jacke
2009:144).
The paramount question is: Are these musicians and media products able and
allowed to create vanguard musical positions? Do they help cocre-ate, push, and
promote concepts of multisited modernities? These emerge polycentrically and
challenge old readings of modernity as Euromodernity and Euro-American
modernity (Grossberg 2010). Thus, do these media products in fact hold
revolutionary meanings?
I discuss these paramount questions from a Euro-American perspective. Yet, they
are important for the musicians in Beirut, tooas I experienced during fieldwork.
These musicians work with similar musical material, aesthetical approaches, and
techniques as musicians in Europe and the US. Many musicians highlight musical
similarities, and focusing on musical differences is far less evident. Their aim is to
compete internationally. They search for recognition within their transnational niche
networks and desire to be trendy, contemporary, hip, or create Zeitgeist.
Accordingly, they want to be analyzed and even criticized through Euro-American
perspectives as well. Trumpet player Mazen Kerbaj confirmed this several times, in
various interviews. He aspires to reach international recognition; to be the best free
trumpet player in Beirut is not enough:
To be able to compete internationally is what is most important to me. Not because
it is better outside, but because abroad I can play in front of an audience that has
experienced free improvised music for many years. To play abroad is the real test! I
hate it when Lebanese are so overconfident. Often they are very happy and proud
too early. Once, a Lebanese friend and me went to see a Lebanese saxophone
player. After the concert, I was very angry; it was the worst saxophone player I had
ever heard. My friend answered, Yes, but for a Lebanese, he was good. This is
what I hate; this makes me almost vomit. It's like admitting that we Lebanese are
just a bunch of shits. I really hope this will changeand this is one of the reasons
we want to compete internationally and prove ourselves. Consequently, I measure
these musicians between two overall concepts and traditions: One is avant-garde
that I here call multisited avant-garde to imply that it is not Euro-American
exclusively. The other is World Music 2.0. Whenever using the term multisited
avant-garde in the analysis, I argue that these musicians create new vanguard
positions. When using World Music 2.0, I imply that they are still being pushed to
fulfill expectations and adapt to the worldview of Euro- American producers and
audiences and thus offer World Music 2.0, simply an updated version of the
limiting world music (1.0).

A BROAD CONCEPTION OF AVANT-GARDE

In current European music discussions, the term avant-garde is often equated

with new musicwith composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, or
John Cage. I use avant-garde in a broader conception, based on definitions by
Hegarty (2009), Jauk (2009), and Van der Berg and Fhnders (2009).
Accordingly, artists of the avant-garde are those who seek a break with dominant
musical canons. Avant-garde in this broad conception includes Pop- Avant-Garde:
art-pop musicians like John Lennon or Pete Townsend, who graduated from art
schools rather than conservatories (Jauk 2009:73); nonacademic, self-taught pop
musiciansfor example, those in rock n roll, psychedelic rock, or punk, especially
in their first experimental states; and what is sometimes referred to as Black
Sound, a continuum from blues, reggae, calypso, hip-hop, house, dubstep, grime,
UK funky, and much more.
In Black SoundWhite Cube, Dieter Lesage and Ina Wudtke (2010) claim that
Black Sound remained and still remainslargely unconsidered in the avant-
garde context. Musicians from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Beirut help to
change this: They perform not only in clubs and concert halls, but also in art
exhibitions and events, where their work is more easily recognized as avant-garde.
Lebanese computer musician Tarek Atouito name one exampleconstantly
negotiates and switches between the worlds of arts, theater, live music, and club
culture. He performs well-paid events in arts biennales and poorly paid shows in
small music clubs.
My decision to use the Euro- American and military term avantgarde albeit a
bit provocatively underlines that I do not use a relativist approach toward music
in Beirut. I challenge what scholars often refer to as emic and etic perspectives.
Emic and etic are less than ever linked to place. A free improviser from Berlin
has an emic understanding of a free improviser in Beirut, whereas to a Lebanese
neighbor his improvisations and sound textures might not sound like music at all.
The neighbor, however, might understand motivations and struggles of the Beiruti
improviser of which the musician from Berlin is unaware.
Consequently, in this book, I analyze music from different perspectives in Parts III
and V. For the aesthetical perspective, I drew inspiration from reception texts by
Tagg and Clarida (2003) and Steinholt (2005) and sent key tracks to expert
listeners of specific music genres in Europe, the US, and the Arab world. I further
include international reviews of their media products. I also discuss, analyze, and
criticize their media products from my own point of view. The goal is to see how
their music is being discussed and judged within specialized music circles. Other
perspectives are closer to the Lebanese neighbor mentioned in the preceding: for
example, it looks for the sociopolitical role and value of these musicians and media
products within Lebanon. The purpose is to expose as many perspectives,
references, and attributions of meaning as possible and to highlight discrepancies
in representation strategies of these musicians.
TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS AND HUBS

My analysis of the transnational media performances from Beiruti musicians is in

line with research approaches by Jocelyne Guilbault, Nadia Kiwan, and Ulrike
Meinhof. Guilbault (1993) describes the music genre Zouk and its local, regional,
and international networks. Through her approach, she shows clearly how Zouk
generates a great number of meanings for different people: Contradictions and
diverging opinions are the norm, she writes (1993:xix). In their book Cultural
Globalization and Music: African Artists in Transnational Networks, Kiwan and
Meinhof (2011) work similarly. They analyze personal narratives and practices of
African and European musicians, plus their interactions and interrelations (1). The
authors look at the actors who constitute these musicians' networks and find them
in the wider artistic, cultural and civil society milieus of global and globalizing
societies (ibid.). The set-up is similar to Beirut, as I am going to show. Many of the
involved actors are from Europe and the US: NGOs, concert organizers, arts
curators, multipliers as bloggers and journalists, and embassies. Kiwan and
Meinhof make an important claim: We suggest that artists who create or enter such
networks follow a different logic of translocal and transnational links than is normally
associated with diaspora and migration research on music. Thus we are widening
the scope from bifocal, ethnically and spatially defined communities in sending
and originating countries to the more complex and fluid flows and networking of
individuals. (Ibid.) Kiwan and Meinhof define the term hubs according to the way
they support transnational flows: human hubs, spatial hubs, institutional hubs, and
accidental hubs (3):
Human hubs and their social networks cross over and link very different
geographic spaces as well as different types of special spaces in a variety of
cultural, institutional, professional and other kinds of contexts (4).
Spatial hubs refer to the important role of capital and metropolitan cities in the North
(such as Paris and London) as key nodes for migration flows and migration
cultures. According to Kiwan, the cities in the South play similar roles for both the
translocal movements of artists within their nations and the transnational
multidirectional movements between North and South. They offer access to
reception platforms, and in these cities, you find a concentration of human and
institutional hubs (5).
Institutional hubs include particular key institutions and organizations that help
organize or are themselves integrated into artists' networks. They link human and
spatial hubs (6). Here we find the cultural institutions and the NGOs of the North.
Kiwan and Meinhof further mention expatriate associations in the North. They
support their artists in various ways. Third, they mention the almost unre-
searched interconnection between artists and civil society movements devoted
primarily to developmental causes of aid but which in some important instances
interact with artists (6).
These institutional hubs are crucial for the musicians in Beirut, too. Accidental hubs
involve, for example, the researcher, as Kiwan and Meinhof state: We were
building up the very network structures that we are researching. () In working with
professional or aspiring artists, the chance of our turning into accidental hubs is
arguably even stronger than in the anthropology of everyday practices (7).
This was exactly the case with my research in Beirut. I became involved with these
musicians on many levels. Kiwan and Meinhof link their research of musicians of
Malagasy and North Africa to Transcultural Capital Theorya very fruitful approach,
even though I am not going to use it in detail in this book. They use the term
transcultural capital to define who has which chances in the various networks.
Transcultural Capital Theory shows the highly integrated interaction of different
types of capital in the lives of transnational artists (Kiwan and Meinhof 2011:8).
This theory works along the capital theory of Pierre Bourdieu (1987), who
distinguished the main categories of economical, cultural, social, and symbolic
capital. Cultural, social, and symbolic capital contain, for example, artistic or
intellectual knowledge and skills, prestige, and existing social networksall
powerful resources for those who posses them. Transcultural Capital Theory offers
not an essentializing concept through which artists are frozen into their ethnic
niches, but rather a strategic one, which enables us to describe the ways in which
artists use the valuable resources acquired in their countries and cultures of origin
to underwrite and develop their art and at the same time underwrite and support
their commercial appeal to different publics (ibid.:9). This is very clearly what I am
going to show in the case of Lebanese musicians.
Phenomenology and reflexive ethnography offer helpful tools for an analysis of
transnational media performances in transnational networks. Phenomenology
describes experiences and actions from the first-person point of view (Berger
1966). We not only analyze the structures of networks, but we also analyze how
these structures influence media products. Conscious, intentional actions of an
actor are put into a specific habitat or lifeworld, an environment the actor acts in.
This environment offers a specific set of possibilities. Through repeated actions, the
actor learns to know and maybe challenge the enabling conditions of his
environment and thus gains experience:
All interpretation of this world is based upon a stock of previous experiences of it,
our own experiences and those handed down to us by our parents and teachers,
which in the form of knowledge at hand function as a scheme of reference.
(Schtz 1975:72)
Overall, the phenomenological approach enables us to put forward farranging
theses without ignoring the complexity, inconsistency, and processoriented nature
of human (and musicians') behavior and strategies. Informants move beyond their
historic role as cultural actors playing out a script to being fully engaged cultural
participants actively engaged in their experiences (Barz and Cooley 2008:19).
This kind of research implements demands by prominent social and cultural
scientists. Bourdieu and Wacquant state in Reflexive Anthropologie (1996) that it is
neither the individual nor the collective that social sciences should focus on, but the
various interrelations between the two. In order to catch this in-between world,
Appadurai (1998, 2003) and other scientists (Beck, Giddens, and Lash 1996; Beck
2002; Giddens 1995; Hall 2008, 2007, 1996) focus on beliefs, ideas, reflections,
and visions of human beings. It is in these thoughts and ideas where important
theoretical concepts like identity find their living and often contradictory
expressions. Appadurai calls for a new ethnography that is capable of evaluating
the role of imagination in today's lives and is thus able to understand the variety of
changes we go through on our planet (1998:24). He (and others) suggest the
introduction of films, theater plays, novels, travelogues, and other cultural
expressions and forms of art into the ethnographical researchnot only as side
elements, but as its sources (ibid.:37). Consequently, I would argue that the
analysis of music and the discourses around music offer us detailed and nuanced
insights to the socioeconomic conditions and structures in which musicians are
living and acting. Hence, a systematic, empirical ethnomusicological research offers
a vital contribution to the debates on worldwide processes of globalization and
localization.

A REFLEXIVE CONCEPT OF CULTURE

Media products and transnational media performances from Beirut encompass

musical genres of multiple nations and continents; are mixed and transmitted by
modern technologies; and are promoted and supported by human, spatial,
institutional, and accidental hubs. These complex interrelations between production,
distribution, reception, and further processing ask for a fundamentally reflexive
concept of culture one which is process- and dynamic-oriented, media sensitive,
broad, and as nonnormative as possible. It is not absolutely necessary to link
discussions of this book to concepts of culture from an academic point of view. In
daily discussions with producers, labels, journalists, funders, and fans, however,
musicians are often confronted with old concepts of culture that have little place
in academics anymore. Still, they flourish in daily life and in categories and
promotion strategies on cultural markets. Such discussions appear strongly when
music travels far distances when Middle Eastern, African, Asian, or Latin
American music reaches Euro-American reception platforms. As this book
addresses a nonacademic readership, too, some reflections might be useful.
Clifford Geertz offered a reflexive concept of culture many years ago. He defined
culture as a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means
of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and
attitudes toward life (1987:743).
This concept of culture does not at all end at national borders. I myself am part of
many cultures: I am Swiss and Dutch by passport. I share a great amount of
knowledge (that I received through socialization and education), language,
conventions, and convictions with my fellow Swiss citizens. I see the world from a
specific position and perspective; I anticipate how others from my culture will react
to specific phenomenafor example, noise pollution, work ethics, social invitations,
and much more. In my Dutch culture, I primarily share experiences with my
grandparents, the Dutch language (at least a bit), and some nostalgic childhood
memories of specific food, but almost nothing of present-day Netherlands. I am
further an academic, the third culture I feel part of: I again share with colleagues a
certain amount of knowledge (that I received through my studies, reading, and
conferences), language, conventions, convictions, and worldviews. Then, I work as
a cultural producer, I played saxophone, and today I work with computer software to
edit and manipulate music and sound; as such, I am part of specific music circles,
my fourth culture. Again, I share specific knowledge, language, conventions, and
convictions with other members of this culture. In addition, there are many other
cultures that are defined and created by the specific knowledge, language,
conventions, and convictions shared by the members. This includes discussions
and arguments around knowledge, language, conventions, and convictions. It is
these discussions that lead to change, usually slowly but at times quickly.
When working with Lebanese musicians, I share parts of their music culture
knowledge but nothing of their knowledge of being Lebanese citizens. The
discussions within these music cultures are very specific: ranging from flow,
swing, and sound textures to insider discussions around key references in the
specific genre, origins, criteria for production qualities, and ways of editing,
arranging, mixing, and manipulating material. In this book, I hear and judge their
music through this music culture knowledge; this allows me, a scholar from
Europe, to use an insider approach to Beiruti music. For the musicians, this music
culture however is just the starting point. From this position, they hope to be heard
and recognized outside their cultures as well: by parents and peers,
ethnomusicologists, music journalists, cultural funders, and organizers. Their music
might have a specific translation potential. This means that, outside of the music-
specific discussion (see the preceding), it speaks to greater audiencesor to
different niche audiences. The musicians in question could be good entertainers,
produce onthe- edge video clips or other media products that draw attention, or
they may be great company or good at writing project proposals. The translation
potential of music and the translation skills of musicians become crucial they are
what Meinhof and Kiwan call transcultural capital. To translate is, however,
delicate: The musicians can become criticized as sellouts, to name one example.
In London, many of the musicians of Indian and Pakistani origin that started to sell
their music in the white Euro-American market were declared coconuts by their
peers brown on the outside, white on the inside (Burkhalter 2000). Working on
different reception platformsand thus translating between different cultures
(within the same country or between countries)is always a complex and
surprising matter. Again, the musician can be criticized heavilyor he has to play it
smart on these different platforms. I became European tour manager for the British-
Asian bhangra band DCS from Birmingham for a while. One day, the organizers of
a big Swiss festival, OpenAir St. Gallen, called me and wanted to book DCS
alongside bands like Massive Attack. I called Shin, the leader of DCS, to tell him the
great news. Shin consulted his diary, saw that DCS was booked to perform at a
local wedding on the same day, and said no to St. Gallen. Shin was wise, I thought:
DCS plays around one hundred weddings a year, so that is what pays their rent.
The moment the word got out that DCS prefers to play in Switzerland, he could be
declared arrogant or snobbish, and it could destroy his key market.

THE IMPACT OF THE RESEARCHER

My role as a researcher is not to be underestimatedon several levels. Whenever I

talk with musicians about their production and strategies, they talk in retrospective. I
ask how they started their careers, how this led to that, how they gained bigger
audiences, or how they produced this track. They would always tell me their
stories in ways that I understand and that make sense to a potential readership.
Often chaotic experiences (when working on a career night and day) gain logic and
coherence in retrospectivewe know this.
For example, when looking back on our lives, we might see how this decision led to
that, and how that led to another, whereas at the time a lot happened through
coincidence and luck. Similar issues occur when discussing future plans and
dreams: Living in a region full of conflict, the musicians find it hard to see what the
next years may bring. This is what biographical research teaches us: We always
reconstruct our biography (and career) out of the present. We bundle, categorize,
construct, and reconstruct. Musicians, in a similar way, perform their life story to an
interviewer (see Hermann 2003). As a researcher, I try to see behind these
performances as much as possible. I do so in analyzing their media products, too,
and in getting to know as much as possible about these key musicians through
other actors in the field.3
Alfred Schtz further argues that the scientist creates the worldin a humoresque
moment, he even compares the scientist to God (1975:287). The informant
musician in this case becomes the puppet of the scientist. I classify, describe,
interpret, and analyze structures of experiences in ways that answer to my own
experience. In the humanities, this and other problematic issues are discussed in
the writingculture- debate (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986)
and highlighted with the term crisis-ofrepresentation. Ethnographers tend to
reproduce their own positions and perspectives in their ethnographies, including
their epistemological stances, their relations to the cultural practices and individuals
studied, and their relationships to their own cultural practices (Barz and Cooley
2008:20). I am aware of this problem. I decided to write in first-person singular at
many points in this book, underlining that I write out of my perspective and position.
Two points from writingculture- debate are important:
1. Data Transparency: splitting of the empirical data and the analytical
consequences. One has to know who is speaking: Is it me the scholar or me the
musician? This is one way to limit the ethnographical authority (Clifford 1988, cited
in Hermann 2003:7) of the scholar at least a bit. In this book, I introduce comments
and notes from my field diary as well as direct and unedited parts of my interviews
with musicians. I further introduce comments from expert listeners from a reception
test and international reviews by international journalists.
2. Dialogical Editing: This book proceeds according to the principle of dialogical
editing (Feld 1982:239268). I sent drafts of this book back to the musicians to
discuss. I deleted quotes if they wished, and I corrected mistakes. These
exchanges via e-mail helped a great deal in improving this text. In the book, I
highlight some of their fundamental propositions and critiques now and then.
I allow myself my own critical point of view at times4for example, in sections
marked Fieldnotes. No approach or position is neutral: In performances studies,
the other may be part of one's own culture (non-Western or Western), or even an
aspect of one's own behavior. That positions the performance studies fieldworker at
a Brechtian distance, allowing for criticism, irony, and personal commentary as well
as sympathetic participation. In this active way, one performs fieldwork. (Schechner
2006:2)
I am involved with the musicians on many levels. With some musicians, I performed
on stage with the Norient project Sonic Traces: From the Arab World, and from
others I licensed tracks for the compilation CD Golden Beirut New Sounds from
Lebanon. I invited some musicians to Switzerland for concerts or performances,
and I wrote articles in newspapers or produced radio programs or radio features
about others. For this research, I needed to be involved, I believe. I needed to
understand these musicians' daily praxis in cultural fields in order to be able to write
about them.
Inside ethnomusicology, it is a common theme that scholars feel the necessity to
play non-Western instruments of the non- Western cultures in which they conduct
their studies (see bi-musicality in Hood 1960), but how many ethnomusicologists
master the instruments of the digital age? Some actually do, but it is a small
minority. So, do today's music theorists need to become experts in laptop culture,
DJ-ing, sampling, and sound engineering? To a certain extent, I believe, yes.
While researching, my goal was to find a good mixture of closeness and (critical)
distance to the musicians. I needed to find their trust, and I am now very careful in
how I represent them. The musicians offered me a lot of their time, and I gave them
back at least some public coverage. Even with this book, the musicians hope that it
is supportive for their career.

3 Methodological Approach

Ethnomusicology enjoys the advantages of being an inherently interdisciplinary

discipline, seemingly in a perpetual state of experimentation that gains strength
from a diversity and plurality of approaches. () In this sense, ethnomusicologists
are in a unique position to question established methods and goals of the social
sciences, and to explore new perspectives. These new perspectives are not just for
ethnomusicologists but also for all ethnographic disciplines. (Barz and Cooley
2008:3)
In order to achieve a close reading of the discrepancies and interrelations between
the musical production, the musicians' motives, and the reception on local and on
Euro-American platforms, I work with an experimental, multidisciplinary research
layout. To stand the test of time, this analysis has to be close to the musicians, the
music, and the daily realities on the international reception platforms. This
methodological approach thus switches between close reading of music and broad
overviews of contexts and trends.

MULTISITED ETHNOGRAPHY

This book works with approaches of multisited ethnography (Marcus 1995). Its
claim that local culture is always configured from transnational contexts is crucial in
this analysis. Multisited ethnography not only describes a specific lifestyle from a
local perspective, but it also tries to understand the bigger political, economical, and
cultural frame that influences local life and work. Many of the points mentioned in
the two editions of the book Shadows in the Field are inspiring, for example, the
approaches virtual fieldwork by Cooley, Meizel, and Syed and Internet
Ethnography (2008:90107). Researching via the Internet, discussing questions
and articles via e-mail, and following the bands via Facebook became important
whenever I was not in the field. I constantly observe the musicians (and their media
representations). This keeps my research up-to-date. I can even see with whom the
musicians network and what they discuss, and this generates new research
questions. I keep in mind that online performances on Facebook are very specific,
and I would even argue that they are simply valuable data, when discussed with the
musiciansor at least with other actors in the field.
MAIN PERSPECTIVES: MUSICIAN, MUSIC, MEDIA PRODUCT

In my methodological approach, I work from three main perspectives: 1. The

perspective musician (as an actor) involves all spheres that affect the musician as
a human being and artist: for example, the geographical position in which he (or
she) lives; mobility; financial possibilities; position of the musician in his (or her)
country; and knowledge (through socialization and education). All of this leads to
the musicians' motives (why he or she makes music) and to identity constructions
(and positioning toward the world).
2. The perspective music making (as a practice) involves the processes of music
making and music production (writing, composing, recording, mixing); hard and
software and their inherent laws; the impact of musical influences and references;
and trends within the local music circles and transnational niche genres.
3. The perspective music as a media product involves reception and further
processing: It looks at music, culture, and arts market(s) (and their possibilities);
secondary markets (video clip, film music, game soundtracks); and reception
ideologies of funding organizations, media, and fans. This category offers various
options for action: promotion and networking strategies, representation ideologies,
and performance strategies.
These three main perspectives overlap, and they are temporary working categories
only. However, perspective one (musician as an actor) asks for an empirical culture-
studies approach; perspective two (music making as a practice) for an analysis of
music and sound; and perspective three (music as a media product) for a broad
analysis of the reception platforms with their networks and power structures. Here,
musicians act strategically within a complex network of organizers, agencies,
cultural sponsors, and media.
According to Susanne Binas- Preisendrfer (2010), it is a task for ethnographers to
reconstruct the interaction of these forces and to focus and reflect on the ensuing
aesthetic ideas. This is exactly what I do in this book.

ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK

The main data of this long-term study derive from several pieces of field research in
Beirutthe main ones were conducted in 2005 and 2006, when I lived in Beirut.
Smaller ones I conducted in short research trips (between one and three weeks)
between 2001 and 2011. I used some of the methodological approaches of
grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1996). Basically, grounded theory enables us
to put forward far-ranging theses without ignoring the complexity, inconsistency, and
process-oriented nature of human (and artist) behavior and strategies. To approach
musicians in Beirut as closely as possible, I used a set of qualitative research
methods: different forms of interviews (structured, semi-structured, informal/theme-
based, biographical/with single informants or groups); participant observation; and
systematic observation (Beer 2003:119; Hauser-Schublin 2003:33) of the
musicians in their daily life and during concerts. I focused on many actors of
different age-groups working in or around the field of music in Beirut. All in all, I met
and interviewed around one hundred musicians; composers; scholars
(musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and social anthropologists); music producers
(record producers, festival and concert organizers); media people (journalists and
editors); members of arts councils (from different international institutions); and
music lovers. Further, I observed their activities in numerous settings: from
international music festivals in Baalbek, Beiteddine, and Byblos, to club concerts in
the trendy Beirut areas of Gemmayzeh and Hamra, to rehearsal sessions in small
cellars or in big villas. My aim in meeting that many actors was to become as well
informed about the Lebanese context as possible. This became increasingly
important the more I met the key musicians. Most of them I met several times in
different constellations. The intention was to slowly bring the discussion to the
deeper levels of music making and to sensitive issues like their childhood in war. To
do so, I needed a lot of knowledge on the local context so I could ask and re-ask
the right questions. Often, the interviews and discussions went on for many hours.
After one meeting, Charbel Haber told me that he had never talked so much and
never given an interview that was that longwe had discussed music for nearly five
hours. It took Raed Yassin and me five hours to go through his piece CW Tapes
for the first time.

MUSIC ANALYSIS RECEPTION TEST

Two of the main decisions this book is based upon call for a rather special
approach to music analysis. The first decision was to work cross-culturally and to
use emic and ethic criteria to analyze and describe music. The second decision
was to focus on a generation of musicians (born during the Lebanese Civil War)
instead of a specific musical style: rap, rock, metal, MBM, free improvisation, or
electronic music, for example. One minor problem is that we cannot transcribe the
variety of musical styles similarly. In most of the cases, I thus create tables with
timelines of specific musical events, and I describe in written text specifics such as
which chords are played, what scale is used, and so forth. I use the classical form
of notation in the track Aranis only. The problem with notation and transcriptions
remains that they can show only a glimpse of the actual musical phenomena.
Furthermore, the moment a musicologist applies a traditional notation, the social
scientist and the untrained reader are excluded from discussion. The major
difficulty, however, was (and is) that I am not an expert in all the musical styles that I
focus on in this book. Having played clarinet in a music school and saxophone at
the Swiss Jazz School of Bern (and in some local bands) for quite a while makes
me understand more about jazz and free improvised music than about metal music.
Today, I further perform in audiovisual performance projects, and I sometimes DJ.
This gives me some knowledge of live electronics. I further use various software
programs to edit and manipulate sounds for radio features and podcasts.
To gain more knowledge across the various music styles, I decided to conduct a
small reception test. I sent these metal, rap, rock, free improvisation, and electronic
music tracks to thirty listeners in Europe, the US, and the Arab world. Most of them
were musicians, ethnomusicologists, musicologists, and music journalists. They
knew neither that this music was from Beirut nor the names of the musicians. In this
book, I include only small parts of their answers. However, I used their comments
within my research: to ask different and new questions to the musicians, or to
discuss certain criticisms.
The book Rock in the Reservation Songs from the Leningrad Rock Club 198186
by Yngvar Bordewich Steinholt (2005) inspired this reception test. Steinholt adapted
a reception test by Philip Taggsee Music Analysis for Non-musos (Tagg 2001:9
14) for his study. In his book, he asks amateur musicians to listen to four pieces of
music, and he edits and adds their comments in his analysis chapter. With his
reception test, Steinholt further aims to achieve the same goals as I do: He states
that the feedback of the listeners would cover a sufficient basis on how the bands
from Leningrad use and combine Western musical styles and to which extent
their recontextualisation of rock styles creates particular local styles (Steinholt
2005:12).
This setting is challenging. The ideal is to get a multisited ethnography and to
receive results that show the complexities of musicians' actions in today's
globalized and digitalized world. I need this highly abstract yet flexible theoretical
and methodological framework in order to approach, read, and make thick
descriptions (in the sense of Geertz 1987) of very specific examples in music
practice. In this manner, I wish to fulfill the fundamental requirement of popular
music researcher Binas-Preisendrfer. She argues that a scientific exploration of
the musical phenomena in a modern globalized and mediated world demands both
reflexive theoretical concepts as well as very specific, small-scale studies
(2010:103).
One aim of this book is thus to propose a way of analyzing music in today's
globalized and digitized world. This analysis should be close to the musicians and
the music, but it should not ignore power balances and realities on the cultural
markets.
I try to apply this proposition, working with the following hypothesis: Music making
in an increased digitalized and globalized world is influenced more than ever by
both virtual transnational trends and phenomena and by local musical and
nonmusical spheres of influence. Contemporary music analysis has thus to link
analysis of music (and music performance) with cultural and social studies and
collect data in transnational contexts.