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Musicalized ontologies: Exploring the role of music in contemporary cultural and political worldmaking
Göteborgs universitet.
Örebro University, School of Music, Theatre and Art. (ACCLAIM, Aesthetics, Culture and Media)ORCID iD: 0000-0002-5809-3575
2020 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

The presence of music in ideological and political propaganda is an age-old phenomenon. However, in recent times the increasing mediatization and digitalization of cultural and political discourse have caused an unprecedented spread of carefully calculated uses of music in everything from electoral campaigns to the image-building of influencers. This musicalization of communication and discourse is evidenced by the great variety of audiovisual representations available online where music is called upon to reinforce claims to political power, facilitate the spread of conspiracy theories, or sanction different forms of gendered, racial and ethnic stereotyping. Such musicalized ontologies invite us to adopt a particular opinion, attitude or world-view, and they do so by using music as a central corroborating mechanism. In this respect they may be described as instances of what we propose to call discriminatory worldmaking. Employing many of the world-building processes identified by philosopher Nelson Goodman, discriminatory worldmaking is characterized by a strategic, interest-relative and ideologically driven attempt to establish cultural, political and epistemological authority without recourse to reasoned debate or nonpartisan justification. This paper discusses two instructive examples of how music is used as a corroborating mechanism in audiovisually based discriminatory worldmaking: the 2016 Victory Speech by Donald Trump and a 2015 “information” film posted on YouTube by the so-called Flat Earth Society.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2020.
Keywords [en]
Musicalization, Mediatization, Propaganda
National Category
Other Humanities
Research subject
Musicology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-95379OAI: oai:DiVA.org:oru-95379DiVA, id: diva2:1610256
Conference
Musikforskning idag, Lund,10 juni 2020 [DIGITAL]
Available from: 2021-11-10 Created: 2021-11-10 Last updated: 2025-02-07Bibliographically approved

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Volgsten, Ulrik

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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf