THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MUSIC AS EAST ASIAN INTANGIBLE CULTURAL HERITAGE KEITH HOWARD L.P.Hartley begins the prologue to his 1953 novel The Go-Between with the memorable line, PPT2: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ The author has found a diary, hidden within a cardboard collar-box full of relics from his early life, with which to remember his early years. David Lowenthal takes this quote as the title of his 1985 book, telling us that the past has an ever-changing role in shaping and making sense of the present; some of the past is celebrated while some is purged. Museums, likewise, present our shared history, but are increasingly contested sites, where the typical focus on the monumental, on the Great rather than the Little tradition, is challenged by a requirement to include the vernacular, and where the ownership of ‘looted’ artifacts is questioned. PPT3 My contention is that our contemporary zeitgeist is to accept a past that is, to paraphrase the South Asian theatre director and critic Rustom Bharucha, both alive and venerated (1993: 21). It is, rather than objects in museums, the intangible cultural heritage, performed and presented, that allows the past to live. By making the past live, we attempt to sustain our identity, or, as academics, we interpret difference, in an effort to challenge the hyper-real consumerism of our post-modern condition, the ‘cultural grey-out’ of the industrial commodification of synthetic, formulaic production that is designed to generate profits. The clumsy paraphrase PPT4 I’ve just given is from Theodor Adorno’s critique of the popular music industry. I’m trying to capture how Western commodification PPT5 ‘ventriloquizes the world’ (after Shohat and Stam 1994: 191), how Orientalism reinforces the dominant culture by matching the familiar to the exotic, PPT6 how Hollywood films create flashy, shallow forms that disperse cultural divides, PPT7 how world music is, to quote Spencer (1992), ‘easy to take but not at all bland, unfamiliar without being patronizing’, PPT8 and brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by SOAS Research Online