Copyright by Jeffrey Michael Grimes 2008 - The University of Texas ...

theoretical framework in order to help better analyze and explain different types of pop
music from around the world, particularly the amount of “visibility,” in other words, “the
quality of being known to an audience,” these musics receive (17). In Slobin’s scheme,
there are three levels of visibility, local, regional, and transregional. Concerning his
concept of region, Slobin writes, “Regional musics are less easy to define, since I am
using the term…in an offbeat way. If local can be bounded by a village or valley, then
region, intuitively, is a somewhat larger zone of contiguous territory”(ibid.:18). By his
view, there are still “classic regions” (he gives the mono-ethnic nation states of Slovakia
and Slovenia as examples), but in some cases, much larger areas which comprise several
nations can be a region, as long as they form the audience for the music in question. The
rationale for this, as Slobin explains, is that recordings and broadcasting have greatly
increased the visibility of many types of music, to the extent that the audience for any
music is seldom confined to one country or one region of one country. Another
consequence is that the different geographic units that comprise one of Slobin’s regions
need not be neighbors or even located in the same hemisphere.
An additional factor that comes into play in this context is migration. In the
Indian context, this means, for example, the region that is defined by the audience that
consumes Tagore songs would include not only Calcutta or West Bengal, but also all the
(mostly metropolitan) areas outside of Bengal where there exists an audience for
Rabindrasangiit. Or, to give an example more to the point, I would argue that, if we
consider Maharashtra as a classical music region, then we must include the border
regions that Maharashtra shares with Karnataka, namely Belgaum, Karwad, Darwad, and
12