Why Music Matters by Hesmondhalgh David

Author:Hesmondhalgh, David
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2013-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

4.3 That Syncing Feeling

In Small and Keil’s accounts, the value of participation tends to be merged with the value of performance. Dancing at a good gig is not the same thing as playing music with other people, but Small in particular writes as though it is. As we saw in discussing Small, there was also some prevarication about the value of recorded music. Small did not adequately differentiate between the feelings and experiences produced when people enjoy music in the same space, and the feelings and experiences embodied in listening to or dancing to recordings by musicians raised in those traditions. Not many of us had the privilege of attending a 1960s Jamaican dance or a 1970s New York block party, but we may feel we gain some sense of the vitality of such events from ska and hip hop recordings.

In a major recent contribution to thinking about the value of musical participation, the ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino (2008) addresses these issues head-on by producing a simple but rich and helpful categorization of four “fields of musical activity” (90–91). Two of these concern live performance: participatory performance, emphasizing the participation of all present, and presentational performance, where there are clear artist–audience distinctions. Two of them concern recorded music: high-fidelity recordings, which reference or represent the feel of live performance, and studio audio art, which makes no reference to live performance, and where the emphasis is strongly on music as an art object rather than a social activity. Turino is clear that these different fields can co-exist in certain musical genres or practices, and that they represent something of a ­continuum, from participation to sonic art, with greater stress on social integration at the participation end, and more emphasis on individual ­creativity and expression at the sonic art end, and the other two fields ­representing variations of this.

Importantly, given my earlier argument that we need a more diverse and flexible notion of collective experience than can be found in Small and Keil, Turino claims that all the four musical fields should be valued equally: “Since each musical field offers its own benefits for different types of individuals,” he writes, “it would be optimal if all fields were equally valued in every society so that any individual could engage in music making as best fit her personal dispositions and habits” (Turino, 2008: 51).

Let us put aside whether any society could ever feasibly balance such a different set of impulses and traditions. A more striking problem with Turino’s reasonableness here is that Turino’s own preference for the participatory performance form of music-making is very clear. In fact, the most powerful sections of his book represent a celebration of participatory traditions. (These are often based upon his ethnographic fieldwork in Zimbabwe and Peru and his own experiences in playing in a band in the United States, for example, as a zydeco band leader in the Midwest.) His argument is that participation is being displaced by modernization and industrialization, and the valuing of work over leisure (226–231).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.