VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

During the past two decades, there has been a proliferation of popular music output in the Republic of Cyprus that features elements from the Greek Cypriot cultural heritage. This presentation uses this output to discuss the relationship between cultural heritage and globalisation, albeit from a different perspective. Starting with the observation that this output is created by musicians who were born and raised after the assimilation of global musical idioms in their local music vernaculars, it addresses the three following questions: could we interpret the ‘global’ musical idioms as a ‘generational cultural heritage’ (pertinent to world popular music heritage) that horizontally connects followers of various music genres from different parts of the world? Has the success of the (global and commercial) world music category exculpated and encouraged the turn to tradition, that for many young people is connected to the parochial, the ‘uncool’ and the pre-modern? And, finally, could it be the case that, by blending the global and the ‘folk’ musical idioms at the current times of decentered digital communication and transnational communities of followers of various genres, the musicians of the Republic of Cyprus (and other contexts) put their local cultural heritage in the global popular music map? These views, far from undermining the threat that globalisation has been (and still is) to community traditions, it accentuates the agency that contemporary creatives have in re-asserting their place in the world, while also owning their place as parts of the ‘globe’.