Context of the thesis
This work has been carried out during the second and third years of my Bachelor studies at the Sibelius Academy – University of the Arts Helsinki, as part of the Global Music program. This program proposes a unique environment to the students and aims at training global artistic citizens (Thomson, 2024) by placing interculturalism, collaboration, and community engagement as central elements of the curriculum.
Naturally, such environment puts students in contact with a wide variety of musical traditions, for most of which a given student is an outsider. While cultivating the notion of “cultural humility” (Dolloff, 2020) or “intercultural humility” (Thomson, 2024), this curriculum does not necessarily address head on the issue of cultural appropriation.
Yet, transculturalism, and music creation specifically in this context are at the heart of the everyday occupation of students in this program. The curriculum naturally leads students to experiment, to imagine, to hybridize worlds without a priori notions of hierarchical value of the musical material they use or take inspiration from. But are the ethical considerations, in connection with the outside world, overlooked? Is all transcultural music ethical, as long as the creator values all cultures equally? How does the background of the compositor, their positionality in this yet-to-decolonize world, influence what is or is not ethical to do in that regard?
In our department, the term “cultural appropriation” is conceptually present at the corner of each course, but not always named, and rarely examined and discussed, looking at the state of the art and the current good practices, and possibly contributing to the discussion.
Cultural appropriation in general has drawn a lot of attention, including from scholars, although not always in the same direction: some view it as a positive force driving innovation and renewal in music, while others see it as a continuation of colonialism in the sphere of culture, among which music. Starting from the definition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Kendall, 2025), cultural appropriation is the “adoption of certain language, behaviour, clothing, or tradition belonging to a minority culture or social group by a dominant culture or group in a way that is exploitative, disrespectful, or stereotypical”.
At the basis is this assumption of power imbalance between a dominant culture, and a minority one. For this reason, it is often looked at from a black vs. white perspective, or at least colonized vs. colonizer, the latter one being the appropriator and the former the one whose culture or tradition is being appropriated.
However, the concept as formulated above may equally apply to what one could designate a white-white context: a local, white minority culture, appropriated by a white dominant culture. This is especially the case in France where the central Capetian power has ruled for centuries over various regions that initially each had their own language and traditions, which later continued under the republic in the form of an “internal colonialism” as identified by the regionalist movement in the 1970’s.
Finally, this thesis also examines with a critical lens the act of composing by imitation, in the form, inspired an author or a work of art, questioning the line between creation, inspiration and plagiarism in music.
Research aim and research questions
The overarching aim of this study is to question the lines between cultural appropriation and appreciation, inspiration and plagiarism, in the context of transcultural music creation.
The research questions driving this study are:
- How does a composer navigate the issue of cultural appropriation when incorporating elements of another culture (or several) than its own in a transcultural composition?
- What kind of guidelines could help students with navigating the issue of cultural appropriation in a transcultural composition context?
- How much can a composer take inspiration from an existing work or artist, without committing plagiarism?
Structure of the thesis
First, I will explicit the research design of this study, exposing the methods, the theoretical framework, as well as my positionality in this context and the ethical implications of this research. Then I will dive into the matter with a detailed autoethnography of my bachelor project. In the following part, I will propose a musical analysis of, first, La Grande Folie, a piece by the French band San Salvador that I took a lot of inspiration from, and then of the composition that I created during this project. Then I will discuss the ethical questions that this composition process has raised for me, and how I try to address it.