Crossing affordances: Hybrid music as a tool in intercultural music practices

Abstract

ABSTRACT - The article discusses aspects of intercultural musicking and how to analyse hybrid music as a tool in such practices. It investigates joint musicking as a field of negotiation, the result being more and less beneficial to the participants. The article thus suggests a way to analyse discourse in music as much as about music. Musical engagements are addressed in terms of affordance. By applying Simondon’s concept of the technical object, musical affordance is explored as played and made according to certain functions or playing rules, struggling to achieve a certain technicity, or way of functioning. The music realised may block or maintain various affordance logics. This perspective makes hybrid music a matter of point of view, as a relation of relations, implying different affordances at stake for different people. According to Simondon, a technical object is at the same time an aesthetical object, leaving it open to the discovery of new functions and playing rules not intended in the making. This suggests two different dimensions to music as a tool in intercultural practices: the fact that practices are maintained or interrupted and the fact that something new may happen. The article is based on an on-going research project and contains data material from an ethnographic fieldwork carried out within the group Fargespill (Kaleidoscope). Further results will be published in a forthcoming dissertation. Keywords: intercultural musicking, hybrid music, affordance, technicity, fargespill