Journal of Mediterranean Studies special issue : musical translations across the Mediterranean

Abstract

In a 2003 publication, Ruth Finnegan notes that ‘people participate in music in multifarious ways in the different roles they take, the occasion, or their own histories’ (p.189). By extension, a mode through which people can participate in music is by getting involved in musical translation herein understood as a process (i.e. translation as the act of translating, rather than its end product) by which music ‘extraneous’ or ‘unfamiliar’ to us is assimilated, comprehended, internalized and, eventually, transformed and given a different colouring in one’s own consciousness so as to become palatable and attain a degree of acceptance. From a similar perspective, if musical meanings ‘are based on (or, we might extrapolate, consist of) networks of codes established within a community, modelled by the context, by circumstances, by ideology’—as Fabbri remarks in this issue—musical translation can be seen as the process by which such codes are restructured and adapted to varying contexts, circumstances, ideologies, a process implying the re-definition of conventions previously established within communities. As there can’t be any prescriptive concept about how a community should be structured to fit into this theoretical framework (otherwise, the framework itself would be extremely weak), all kinds of communities can be considered, from local, strictly connected communities, to large, dispersed, ‘imagined communities’, to the scientific community itself. Davis’ commentary (in this issue) on the work of the comparative musicologist Robert Lachmann in the 1930s suggests ways to disentangle the contradiction between Lachmann’s idea that music can’t be translated, and comparative musicology’s concept (not as outdated as it would seem) that musical values and meanings within one culture are understandable in relation to corresponding values and meanings in other cultures. The articles compiled in this special issue, whilst giving evidence of the complex debate that surrounds the topic, bring forth the prevailing fact that musical translation is another mode of musical participation with its own dynamics, interrelated processes and different forms of mediation. These articles scrutinize the ways different musical cultures in the Mediterranean employ musical translation to transform the musically ‘un/familiar’ or ‘un/ palatable’, to establish or maintain links with the glorious past or remnants of it, to evoke nostalgia, to comment on the present, to express their aspirations for the future, as well as to consolidate their place within their own musical culture and market themselves and their musical product. The research approach employed by most of the contributors to this issue relies on the methods of ethnomusicology and popular music studies, an approach that is mainly characterized by an investigation of both the ‘music itself’ as well as the world from which it emerges and gets its meaning.