Turning youthful adventure into a lifelong project; interview with Martin Stokes

Abstract

Kutluk: I want to begin with the term ‘musical citizen’. You begin your last article with these sentences: “Many if not most societies believe that good music produces good citizens. In the Western tradition, we have been familiar with the idea since the time of Plato. The idea is an enduring one, certainly very much alive today.” You suggest this idea is still strong and alive today and this is a surprise for me. Could you please describe the situation at presentin the UK? Stokes: The classical idea has been revived in many shapes and forms in the modern West, but most influentially and importantly I think in Paris at the time of the Exposition Universelle of 1889. The organizers of this had a clear conception of citizenship – one that needed to be rescued from the turmoil of the revolutionary period and its aftermath - and a clear conception of the arts – indeed, the global arts, in fostering such ideals. In my own country, the idea has a long and connected history. The immediate post-war years, the 1950s, saw a reenergized discourse of culture in the service of citizenship, accompanying the building of key bits of post-war national cultural infrastructure in the UK – the South Bank Centre in London, the BBC and so forth. The idea was under attack in the Thatcher years; ‘culture’ reduced to the entertainment industries and the market, and the state only considered responsible for the education and infrastructure required to produce engineers and entrepreneurs. But I would still describe it as a strong one. One only has to look at the current discussions about music and arts education in schools, about how underfunded they are, about how they are increasingly becoming the preserve of the wealthy, to see how strong the idea still is.

Keywords

• Martin Stokes
• interview
• ethnomusicology

References

1. Kutluk, F. (2019), Turning youthful adventure into a lifelong project; interview with Martin Stokes, Rast Musicology Journal, 7(2), s.2084-2090. Doi:https://doi.org/10.12975/pp2084-2090
2. Kutluk, F. (2019), Turning youthful adventure into a lifelong project; interview with Martin Stokes, Rast Musicology Journal, 7(2), s.2084-2090. Doi:https://doi.org/10.12975/pp2084-2090