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Tradition and Change: The Case of Music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
Extract
The cultural patterning of perceptions has long been an accepted fact. Theways we see and hear are learned. Special institutional mechanisms thatserve to perpetuate such traditional patterns exist in all societies and haverecently received attention by those interested in their transformationthrough modernization. Thus in order to study ‘The Primitive World andits Transformation’ Robert Redfield felt it necessary to focus upon what hecalled ‘the social organization of tradition’. He placed major emphasis upon those institutions that traditionally had perpetuated and elaborated the great philosophical and religious traditions of ancient civilizations, while keeping them integrated with the little traditions of peasant villagers. This was accomplished through drawing upon the creative impulses of the little tradition as sources of new stimuli to serve as points of departure for further elaboration of the great tradition. These would reinfluence the little tradition, establishing a chain of mutual interdependence.
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- Tradition and Change
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- Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1970
References
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2 Malm, William P., Japanese Music and Musical Instruments (Rutland, Vermont, and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1959), p. 265.Google Scholar
3 Revised and published as The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950).Google Scholar
4 It should be noted that jazz is the product of an American little tradition originally drawing upon extra-Western elements, one in which improvisation is paramount.
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6 Ibid., p. 8.
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13 At a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, K. Doxiades pointed out that any place on earth is accessible by jet travel from any other in twelve hours—this is approximately the same as the time it took the citizen of a city state to walk from its center to the border of it.