Music and Cultural Rights (review)

Andrew Weintraub and Bell Yung, both known for their extensive work on musics in Southeast and East Asia, center their edited volume, Music and Cultural Rights, on carving a discursive space between official policies on human rights and real-life encounters between governments and musical communities. Formed from papers presented at a conference at the University of Pittsburgh in 2005 with funding from the Human Rights Division under the Peace and Social Justice Program of the Ford Foundation, the volume contains many chapters of interest to readers of this journal, including three essays concerning the People's Republic of China, and others examining music of the Philippines, Tibet, Hawai'i, Ukraine, Peru, and Brazil. Collectively, these case studies explore eight viewpoints on cultural rights, particularly the elements of musical activity not explicitly protected by current international resolutions. Throughout the eight chapters, all authors consistently express some form of discomfort with the formalized protection afforded to human rights and cultural rights provided primarily by the United Nations Resolution on Human Rights (UNHR) and the UNESCO conventions on Indigenous Peoples and Intangible World Heritage. Both the UNHR and the resolutions from UNESCO on Indigenous Peoples and Intangible Heritage receive repeated criticism in this volume for running counter to the aims and desires of musicians present in the nations.

In his introduction Weintraub carefully constructs the history of cultural rights, beginning with Charles Seeger's desire for a "cultural democracy" and Seeger's statements that music acts as a commodity and musical structures are the controlling forces trading that commodity. Furthermore, Weintraub delineates immediately that cultural rights cannot be limited to copyright laws concerning individual ownership, and he further defines cultural rights as the right to any form of expression that "asserts one's cultural identity and heritage" (3). The questions Weintraub poses at the end of his introduction set the tone for the rest of the volume: What do cultural rights on a global scale mean and how does this affect their definition? Thus, Weintraub contends that the goal is to create a space for universal rights to be placed in dialogue with cultural specifics.

Ricardo Trimillos follows Weintraub's introduction with an essay on the representation of the Philippines at the 1998 Smithsonian Folklife Festival. This essay dovetails with the dialogic space Weintraub invites in his introduction as Trimillos lays out three categories: right to access, right to steward, and right to control. Within this schema are several subheadings, and these methods of access, stewardship, and control are used as frameworks in the subsequent essays ensuring methodological consistency throughout the volume. Many of the issues the authors raise, ranging from ownership to rights of representation, already exist in the ethnomusicological literature, for example, in Nettl's Encounters in Ethnomusicology: A Memoir (2002) and Barz and Cooley's Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (2008). While the presence of dialogues circling the issue of cultural rights exists in other volumes, by reframing these issues as part of a larger dialogue on music and cultural rights, political lines of persuasion that are often relevant to many of these situations become clear.

Following Trimillos's essay, Helen Rees, Amy Ku'uleialoha Stillman, and Javier Leόn all devote some portion of their essays to the delineation of cultural rights as often targeted toward the individual and not the group. Here various charters, lists, and resolutions from the United Nations are criticized for clearly supporting the role of the individual—particularly those recognized as artists by the nation-state—more than the role of group creators in group-focused societies. Within the collection of essays it is clear that the representation of minorities, both individuals and groups, is a constant struggle between the rights protected by the various charters and the rights restricted by the nations in which those minorities reside.

Isolating the essays dealing with cultural rights in China, it...