Music'Oriente : appréhender l'expérience d'un stage de musiques cubaines à Santiago de Cuba
This thesis aims to identify the parameters of the experience of a group of tourists who participated in the 2014 edition of the Music’Oriente workshop, which focused on learning Cuban music in Santiago de Cuba. Our research is specifically concerned with the various strategies used by the participants to optimize their experience. The music-tourism relationship in this field requires a different perspective than that for a classic performance pattern which places the tourists in the audience and leaves most of the musical practice to natives. When considering the tourists’ experiences in the musical workshop, our perspective reveals that not only is the tourists’ appreciation of the musical performance important but also their attribution of meaning to their own music-learning approach in the context of travel abroad. By putting the tools of ethnomusicology, philosophy, social psychology and anthropology of tourism into action, and by using the concepts of experience (Dewey c2005) and flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1990), this thesis aims to highlight that the process of optimization requires participants to constantly negotiate their relationship to the known and the unknown to achieve the highest number of benefits of immersion in a foreign context. Through this research, we hope that our theoretical contribution, focused on the tourists' agency and process of constructing meaning, will lead to a deeper understanding of the experiential dimension of musical practice in a tourism context.
Cuba Flow Ethnomusicology Tourism Experience Learning Cuban Music