Introduction

Abstract

Scales are neither natural nor neutral but actively and constantly produced and practised, with real political effects. Human-geographical and anthropological scholarship has demonstrated this with special attention to political-economic and social processes, but the project of understanding how cultural practices produce scale remains unfinished. A review of music research shows that it tends to use scalar categories (e.g. local, urban, regional, global, world) in varyingly critical ways, and as a field it therefore has both most to gain from and most to offer to a fuller conceptualisation of the cultural production of scale. In particular, music scholars should treat scales as open questions, and as phenomena potentially produced through musical practices, rather than as stable categories upon which to base, or with which to frame, other arguments. Attending to how music harnesses, manipulates, contests and constructs the scales that have been more commonly used to frame and explain it enables a richer musicological analysis and a deeper understanding of the world’s geographies.