Abstract


The history of Greenlandic music is one of cross-local interconnectedness. Styles and trends have evolved as a result of globalization, but there is a significant trend amongst popular music artists in Greenland to perform a sense of local and national identity in their music, and to produce music that is relevant to a national context. Through a look at how musical styles have evolved in Greenland, and how popular music trends have changed over time, in this article, I trace the presence of a broadly acknowledged repertoire of sounds and lyrical themes for performing place in music. Through a discussion of the role of place in music that draws on Massey’s ‘global sense of place’ (1994), I suggest that in music, places are best understood as meeting points, and that place as meeting point is in some form or another always noticeable in music. I furthermore argue that place in music is often connected to local contexts both by drawing on locally developed particularity, but also by being affected by the history of globalization in local places.