Songs of the Minotaur. Hybridity and Popular Music in the Era of Globalization

In an age of globalization and rapidly changing musical landscapes, social scientists from different countries and disciplines attempt to analyze the contemporary cultural dynamics of some of the current ethnical musical styles with respect to their commont traits.Their approach is based on the conceptions of hybridty and hybridization as they are currently discussed in the cultural and social sciences as well as in musicology itself. Alluding to the labyrinth as a metaphor of the revelation of complex ramifications, it is hoped that this approach will provide a new theoretical and methodological access to the explanation of recent processes of cultural transformation within the field of popular music.