World Music, Value, and Memory

This chapter attempts to understand the value of a particular traditional music that has been constructed as “world music” in a capitalist marketplace. It is not simply a matter of the commodification of something previously uncommodified, but the shift from one regime of value to another. Taking the Irish traditional music session as a case study, it argues that, while some Irish traditional music today can be understood as a commodity, most of the music exists in another regime of value, in which it is sociality that matters to participants more than anything else. This conception of sociality includes the practice of many musicians' sharing of photographs of sessions on social media, and participants' memories of tune sources, teachers, and other sessions.