How does music create community?
Hawkins and Knudsen: Photo: lk
A recording studio where young artists create rap music is as culturally complex as possible. This is the opinion of musicologists Jan Sverre Knudsen and Stan Hawkins who are studying a hip-hop group in Oslo: How does music create bonds? How does it create boundaries? And how does immigration influence the development of music genres?
The research programme Cultural Complexity in the new Norway has awarded these two musicologists financial support for two month’s research on “Bonds and Boundaries in a Multi-Cultural Norwegian Space”. The starting point for the project is the conviction that music is one of the most powerful social forces for setting up boundaries, creating bonds, and constructing identity.
A number of previous research projects in Scandinavia have focused upon music’s social significance within individual immigrant communities. Researchers within this field believe that it is also important to study multicultural environments.
- When people enter a social space from different backgrounds they make music that can be understood as transnational through genres such as hip-hop. This is a process that often leads to new hybrid forms, Hawkins contends.
The two researchers will spend some of their time in a recording studio at a youth centre in Oslo together with young hip-hop artists.
- How did you come up with the idea of doing research in a recording studio?
- Music production is a neglected field of research within musicology. I have just come back from London from the first ever conference on the production of music - “The Art of Record Production” where such issues were addressed This was the first time that producers, performers and academics have been invited to an international conference of this kind where they could talk to one another about these issues, says Stan Hawkins.
An exciting social situation
Jan Sverre Knudsen stresses that a lot more happens in the studio than just the actual production of music:
- The production of music always provides an exciting social situation. But there’s a big difference between rap music produced by amateurs and professionally produced pop music. In commercial pop music the producer plays a central role, but among the young rappers we are in contact with we find it striking that music production is fully a collective affair. There is plenty of room for a wide variety of lyrics and musical approaches, and no single person has the last word. Community takes prominence.
When Knudsen is asked what cultural complexity is the first thing he thinks of is the recording studio:
- The small recording studio we are looking at is a complex cultural arena where global style is remade and given local significance. The instrumental foundation for the music is so-called “beats”, which in many instances are downloaded from the Internet. In one way these beats have a depersonalized status: who has created them, and in which country the composer might be situated, is generally of little interest. The musical foundation is then worked upon, remade and given a local and personal character that is relevant for these young refugees, second generation immigrants and Norwegians in a multicultural urban youth environment. The music reflects the experience of today’s Oslo even though the hip-hop style originally comes from black musicians in New York. The way I see it, this is pretty much as culturally complex as it gets.
Ethnicity is of minor significance
What fascinates Knudsen is that ethnicity seems to be of minor significance in the process of creating a collective musical voice:
- From the start these artists have worked together on an equal footing. Hip-hop music is a common denominator that everyone has an equal relationship to. Within this framework your cultural background does not provide any advantages, whether you are Norwegian, Moroccan or Bosnian. We might perhaps ask ourselves whether what happens within a “multicultural” local environment of this kind probably could have just as much significance when it comes to community-building and integration as some of the large-scale collaborative music projects that the authorities have supported. A great many resources have been invested in projects that are built around the idea that it is especially beneficial to allow as many and as different as possible forms of music to come together.
- You can believe in music’s potential to unite people from all corners of the world, especially when you bring together countless different influences and groups of people. However, this is certainly an utopian idea, which needs to be challenged, Hawkins adds.
To understand music you need to understand society
Musicologists are generally speaking more interested in different styles of music than in themes that deal with ethnicity, unity, and integration. But to be able to understand the music, these two researchers insist, you need to understand the society. You need to look at the relational aspects of music production:
- Musical styles are always in flux: they change through time. For example, the changes within hip-hop reflect the movements of people into and out of a milieu. Such changes have much to do with immigration, but also with technological innovation and temporality. Investigating the relationship between social elements and the development of styles is one of the main challenges of musicology today, Hawkins explains.
It’s therefore an advantage that we have different academic backgrounds, the researchers agree. Jan Sverre Knudsen comes from the field of ethnomusicology and is also a trained music therapist. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the role of music in the construction of identity of among Chilean immigrants in Oslo. Knudsen teaches music at the Faculty of Education, Oslo University College, and, in addition, teaches courses in World Music at the University of Oslo.
Stan Hawkins’ field of research is within popular music studies, which is involved in issues of postmodernism, gender studies and Cultural Studies. Among his numerous publications are articles on Madonna, Bjørk, Prince, Morrissey, and House music. He is the editor of the academic journal, Studia Musicologica Norvegica and the distinguished international journal, Popular Musicology Online. His most recent book “Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity” (in collaboration with feminist Sheila Whitely and sociologist Andy Bennett) focuses on new perspectives within popular music research.
Why Norwegian hip-hop is different from hip-hop in the USA
By studying interaction in a recording studio Hawkins and Knudsen wish to study aspects of the evolution within hip-hop in Norway, which is significantly different from hip-hop in the USA.
- Representations of youth in Oslo rap is about completely different themes than in the USA, for example, the experience of refugees or even romantic love - in contrast to the the themes which generally characterize American rap. Something they have in common nevertheless is the personal existential experience that lies at the heart of the texts.
Technological innovation has obviously led to new understandings of ownership, they explain:
- It’s not always so easy to say what is really the composition or song. The musical material may be downloaded from the Internet, stored on a PC, and arranged by various people. One “composition” we have studied was worked oninitially created collectively by three rappers one evening in the studio. A week later there came amendments from a fourth, and later a fifth. Most probably, this piece will never be performed in the same way twice. The track being used can be changed In accordance with whoever is on stage for a particular performance.
- This reminds me of the new collective web technologies such as wikis and blogs, where the text in no longer static but instead a process: Any number of people can collaborate and nobody owns the text?
Stan Hawkins (SH): - Yes, absolutely. There is always movement between the individual and collective consciousnesses.
An interest in folk music and non-western music
- How significant is the question of multiculturalism within musicology?
SH: - It’s very significant. All our students go through a very important course on World music, which Jan Sverre Knudsen teaches. Interdisciplinarity is high on the agenda and we have noted that many students are now interested in studying popular music, folk music and non-western music. For example, I hold a course on music and identity which is about how different understandings of gender are articulated in, for example, music videos. We also look at orientalism and how this study stems from Edward Said’s work.
JSK: - The goal of the course in World music is to gain a perspective on different realizations of music around the world. We are not bound by the field of commercial World music; for example, we have one lecture on national anthems and one on the taboo pertaining to Wagner's music in Israel.
- Which areas of of activity should involve more research?
SH: I would like to see more research on matters of gender and race within music research. The politics of identity are quite neglected areas within traditional musicology.
JSK: I would really like to see more ethnomusicologists focus on themes which go further than tradition and cultural heritage. There are some good initiatives, especially in Sweden. I am thinking, for example, of the book by Lundberg, Malm and Ronström: “Music, media and multiculture”.
- What expectations do you have of the CULCOM project?
JSK: CULCOM has so far sown some seeds and nurtured them well. I am really looking forward to seeing a blooming garden, to put it metaphorically (laughs). A garden with many distinctive plants.
SH: - Yes, above all hybrid plants!
Interview: Lorenz Khazaleh - Translation: Matthew Whiting