Music: Ethics and the Community

This volume is dedicated to the topic of Music: Ethics and the Community, the seventh publication in the UPM Book Series on Music Research. The topic widely connected to all aspects of music includes expression of or attachment to ethics that are given or modified through normative structures in the community where music is practiced. The contributors are coming from Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Korea, Singapore, Brunei, Germany, Serbia, and Iran.

Questions of individual or communal ownership of traditions, ways of preservation and revival of specific performing arts, any perspective of the communal music market which is highly based on dynamic normative structures, questions of censorship and permissibility of music as well as related issues regarding the conduct and evaluation of music research and the use of music and sound in therapy fall under this broad topic.

Papers selected and included in this volume embrace a wide range of subtopics that come from the wider cultural picture and narrowing down to the closer Southeast Asian region, followed by discussions on legal issues, micro-communal perceptions, social issues, partly overlapping with discussions on ethical approaches to music therapy. The volume concludes with papers on urban developments and a discussion on local gender issues and offers, as a whole, an interesting horizon of current discussions on music related to ethics and the community.

Preservation issues as well as ideas on ethics in music practice are omnipresent throughout all papers. Another widely observed phenomenon is the fact that music research itself is considered to be an ethical precondition in dealing with music cultures and with sound in a broader Understanding of any community. In order to analyze ethical issues, music practices and their understanding have to be made known through detailed studies first.