Embracing the Melange
Abstract
The paper will draw on the concepts of Musicking, Imagined communities, Peircean Semiotics as discussed by Turino, and Bakthin’s critical theory to discuss English-medium folk music in a complex diasporic context in Athens, Greece. It will briefly relay the demographic profile of this diaspora and its music, and move on to explore how preexistent communities inform the music, and how the music feeds back into this cycle to create closer communal ties.
It will then explore the concept of authenticity and the subjectivity of experience, and why formulating thoughts about identity, community and music and the processes by which they come together is as much a personal exploration - a study of your own nature, as it is of the thing you’re trying to study.
It will conclude that bringing people together, evolving music together, understanding your own identity, and putting all of the above into writing are exploratory processes that echo and complement each other - a reflection of the inescapable state of flux which human beings and their musics are called upon to perform in.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
PUBLICATION ETHICS AND MALPRACTICE STATEMENT
The International Journal for Traditional Arts is self-published by the Editors. The Editors are committed to upholding the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics' Code of Conduct for Publishers. Plagiarism, fraudulent publication or any other form of misconduct will not be tolerated. All submissions will be screened for plagiarism before being sent to reviewers. Should unethical behaviour come to the attention of the Editors, an investigation will be initiated, and all appropriate steps will be taken to rectify the situation (including, where necessary, the publication of clarifications, corrections retractions, and/or apologies).
