Abstract
AbstractLouis Armstrong’s ‘What a Wonderful World’ exemplifies popular music’s tendency and ability to build from the particular into the general—or to connect the personal to the universal. The lyrics’ logical leap from local observation to general claim is accompanied by several musical features that enable this leap to be landed. The musical transition to what Édouard Glissant calls ‘Whole-World thinking’ also functions in various cover versions of the song, including politically charged live performances at a Swedish climate protest in 2019, and outside Lviv train station (and widely shared on social media) during Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. This Armstrong classic shows the potential of what might be called musical ‘scale jumping’, following Neil Smith, reorienting audiences to new scales of political contest. It also exemplifies how cultural practices have long been involved in fusing relations between the experiential and the general, or between particular places and what Glissant calls the ‘Whole-World’.
Publisher
Springer Nature Switzerland
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