Exploring musical acculturation: The musical lives of South Sudanese Australians, Filipino Australians and White Australians in Blacktown

The central aim of this thesis is to investigate the musical lives of three distinct ethnocultural community groups. Using ethnographic and grounded theory methods, this study explores the musical practices of South Sudanese Australians, Filipino Australians and White Australians in Blacktown, New South Wales. By researching musical participation in these three case study groups, this study aims to elucidate the relationship between various factors underlying individual and collective musical acculturation processes. Significant factors include the reasons for and attitudes towards cross-cultural contact, the sociohistorical and situational factors determining the context in which cross-cultural contact takes place, and the role of power and dominance in shaping cross-cultural interactions. Other determinants include the various ways ‘community’ is experienced, the maintenance and loss of heritage and homeland cultures, and the musical activities that generate and reflect participants’ understandings and experiences of the preceding. The interplay between these areas of inquiry positions this study at the nexus of music education, sociomusicology, ethnomusicology, acculturation psychology, intercultural relations and urban sociology. It was found that the types of musical activities with which participants engaged illustrated the importance they placed upon maintaining heritage traditions. This was often related to their attitudes towards multiculturalism and integration into mainstream Australian society. For all of the ethnocultural communities studied, nationalism and transnationalism played a major role in acculturation processes. The music with which South Sudanese Australian participants were occupied was significantly influenced by South Sudan gaining sovereignty during the project’s data collection phase. Many of the participants had migrated to Australia long before their new homeland country was declared an independent nation-state, and music was used to represent and facilitate debates surrounding South Sudanese nationalist discourse. In the Filipino Australian case study, it was found that the collective self-consciousness with which the participants assimilated into colonial cultural forms had a marked effect on the music with which they engaged. The contradictions in their music consumption patterns resonated with the ironies underlying Filipino nationalism generally. Finally, music was similarly significant in the renegotiation of cultural boundaries and identity reconstruction for participants in the White Australian case study. Within the highly diverse Blacktown region, interpretations of ‘Australian’ and mainstream music were seen to contribute to the notion of White Australia as the dominant community of the receiving society