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Giancarlo Siciliano here proposes an examination of the notion of postmodernity and of its problematic validity. He bases his arguments on readings of philosophers and critics alike and raises major questions regarding the "race to what comes after" (i.e. "post-postmodernism"…). He addresses issues such as the canon, the rest, the fragment, the presence of history, and the discourse around the crossing of boundaries. He concludes that the notion of "Spätzeit" ("lateness") is preferable to a rhetoric of what is "after", agreeing with Lyotard that "postmodernity is not a new age, but the rewriting of certain traits claimed by modernity". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobilizing resources from ethnomusicology and philosophy, this contribution attempts to encapsulate various issues around the troubling, «intermediary» identity of jazz practice, which can be apprehended properly only as this mixed space where literacy and orality merge, which Vincenzo Caporaletti tried to grasp with the term «audiotactility». The processes of Jazz can then be approached both with respect to its specific medial status, not dominated by writing, yet not pure orality, whose reinterpretative essence (through the presence of the standards) can be read as the perpetual reactualisation of an absent model or origin (following Nancy, Stiegler, Szendy): an act of subversion of Western «scriptocentrism» at the heart of this very culture, and, hereby, a profound questioning of its identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a reflection on the impact of socio-cultural contexts on music and their being taken into account by ethnomusicologists. Topics include the interest of ethnomusicology for the analysis of urban popular musics placed in an economic globalization logic, the multicultural aspect of jazz music, and the danger of a globalized imagination on music.