Key Factors in the Sustainability of Languages and Music: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The challenges posed by a fast-changing global environment to the vitality and viability of musical traditions continue to be a topical issue on the ethnomusicological agenda. Investigations into ways to help keep musical traditions strong are still incipient, however, relative to parallel strategies to protect and promote endangered languages. This article identifies key synergies and disconnects between language and music specifically in relation to factors that impact on their vitality and viability. In this way, it pinpoints areas where theory and practice from the field of language maintenance hold greatest potential to inform the development of ways to keep 'small' music genres strong.Over two decades ago, in the pages of this journal, Jill Stubington published an article about the preservation and conservation of Australian traditional musics. 1 It argued for a need to record and document musical traditions, explored the relationship between preservation and the maintenance of living, vital musical heritage, and suggested appropriate roles for scholars in these processes. Stubington's article represents one manifestation of the long-standing ethnomusicological interest in 'dying' cultures, which over time has undergone notable shifts in nature and degree. Indeed, early disciplinary efforts (from the late nineteenth century) to document musical traditions seen as doomed to extinction are sometimes now rather depreciatively referred to as 'salvage ethnomusicology' (after the anthropological term 'salvage ethnography') for their romanticized, neocolonial perspectives on 'exotic' and threatened cultures.Recent approaches to musics in decline are typically more pragmatic than these earlier ones, acknowledging the natural emergence, change, and decay of musical traditions. 2 While allowing for these processes, current ethnomusicological scholarship remains alert to the many forceful global processes acting upon 'small' music genres, well beyond the natural forces that governed their survival in earlier times. 3 Since Stubington's article, awareness has grown that global communication systems, travel and tourism, mass media, and hegemony and the dominance of western culture (among other things) are jeopardizing the vitality and viability of many smaller music genres of the world. 4

Cultural Diversity, Ecodiversity, and Music Education

“…The protection and rehabilitation of diverse natural ecosystems can further bolster efforts to preserve and revitalize cultural diversity and, reciprocally, strategies that foster cultural diversity can encourage and stimulate ecodiversity. If the diminishment of one kind of diversity can adversely affect the other, then this threat represents a powerful advocacy argument for the need to promote each, and both (Grant 2012).…”

‘Click, Play and Save’: The iGamelan as a Tool for Music-culture Sustainability

“…For the purpose of this article, the notion of sustainable musical cultures is about creating pathways for deeper musical understanding (Titon 2009;Grant 2011). It recognizes the boundaries of musical homelands and their embodied musical soundscapes.…”

Sustaining Performance Habitats for Balinese Animal Effigies in the Anthropocene

“…Music ecology is an evolving research paradigm that observes 'links between nature and culture' where music as an expression of culture sees these two constituent parts 'constantly permeating one another in a mutual relationship (Harley 1996:2). Parallels between biodiversity and cultural diversity have useful implications for examining sustainable approaches towards empowering dwindling diversity of languages and musics (Grant 2011;2012). Many researchers are taking up 'applied approaches' in ethnomusicology and related disciplines 'reflecting an international turn towards ecological studies of music' (Bendrups et.…”