Musical hybridisation: cultural interaction in models of mixtures

Abstract

[Abstract] The multicultural situation serves as natural accelerator, programming and stimulating production of cultural hybrids in different realms. My general project is theory of multicultural texts based on an interdisciplinary approach, linking cultural semiotics, musicology and cultural studies and studying cultural relationships in case of musical mixtures (represented as multicultural texts). The multicultural texts simultaneously introduce two or more cultural identities. Thinking about it, we cannot advance in accurate modeling since calculating a formula to express ratio of mixed elements is not possible. The hybrid is a construction, where pre-texts grow through each other, and one of the most insoluble questions therein is where one cultural area ends and another begins inside the multicultural text. Besides, the mixtures bring new information and preserve the space of pre-existed cultural interaction, which, perhaps, cannot be disassembled and fit to any of those cultural pre-texts. This presentation proposes ways to think of musical mixtures from the angle of their cultural content. We can distinguish mixtures for modes and grades of the textual interaction inside them and to classify the mixtures for their structure. I have formalized types of structural relationships of cultural elements, or cultural pretexts, in the multicultural texts in the three basic models of mixtures called mosaic, application and assimilation. Mosaic is a simple confrontation of entire cultural blocks with no real concordance or coordination between them. Application includes models based on the principle of addition or accumulation. And, assimilation is adoption of another source with the following transformation of both sources. These models at the same time reflect different stages of cultural dialogues and receiving foreign texts by a culture considered by Jury Lotman. Every model will be demonstrated in musical examples.