Cross-Cultural Collaboration in Popular Music

This Element takes a practice-led approach to understanding how culturally different musicians can work productively and ethically.

This Element explores cross-cultural collaboration in popular music, highlighting opportunities for multiple voices and new sounds, but also challenges in technical matching and negotiating power discrepancies. The practitioner-based research field offers new knowledge and pragmatic strategies for creating pop music with culturally diverse people.Cross-cultural collaboration in popular music represents opportunities for the audibility of multiple voices and the creation of new sounds, but it also presents many challenges. These challenges are both musical – that is, how to technically match voices – and ethical – that is, how to negotiate historically entrenched power discrepancies. Practice-based research has recently developed as a field in popular music studies. This burgeoning area has much to offer in terms of new knowledge, based on embodied insights, lived experience, and an arts practice. Through a practitioner-centred account of three projects involving traditional Persian and Vietnamese musicians, and western folk/rock musicians, this Element suggests pragmatic strategies and conceptual frameworks for making pop music with people of different cultural backgrounds.