Materiality and metaphor: Sound in circulation

Four recently published books examine sound in social contexts, including brass bands on the streets of New Orleans, Hawaiian steel guitar, the genre of Noise and its social circulation, and Aboriginal radio production in northern Australia. The authors present the material and metaphoric power of sound in social contexts through thoughtful and thorough historical research and long-term ethnographic study. The influential thinking of John Blacking, Steven Feld, and others is expanded and critiqued in new contexts. Three of the authors are editors or contributors to a recent publication on keywords related to sound in anthropology and ethnomusicology.     

异托邦：音乐节事活动的空间实践——以迷笛音乐节为例

文章使用异托邦理论为概念框架,以迷笛音乐节为案例,通过参与式观察与深度访谈法,试图揭示音乐节空间实践中构建的另类特征。研究发现,迷笛音乐节所承载的功能逐渐由叛逆的“出口”转变为“好玩”的生活方式;音乐节事空间实践中呈现出多元的功能并置,矛盾与流动的融合;音乐节事空间的文化实践也呈现出日常结构的超越与反抗,以及作为理想的补偿空间。周期性节事时空实践中文化的稳定性则使其成为对称而不可分割的系统性时空。该研究为节事空间提供了新的认知途径,也从节事的角度丰富了异托邦理论的微观案例。     

The nation in the region: flamenco and canzone napoletana as national icons in modern Spain and Italy (1880–1922)

Although the relationship between music and nationalism has been at the centre of recent cross‐disciplinary research, many areas remain unexplored. Among them are forms of ‘national music’ that nest overlapping identities, functioning simultaneously as vehicles of regional, ethnic, urban, global and diasporic belongings. This article focuses on the national dimension of these multilevel identities, concentrating on the swings and transmigrations between the national and the regional. It compares two Mediterranean traditions which, particularly between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have served as multilevel identifiers of national and regional belongings: flamenco and canzone napoletana (Neapolitan song). I argue that, besides geographically bounded identities, both genres were constructed as ‘national’ primarily abroad, rather than in their home countries, thus contributing to a theory of the ‘international’ dimension of ‘national’ music. In the case of flamenco, I focus on the irradiation centre of the time, Paris, although the modern notion of musical Spanishness was first associated with national identity in Russia. The canzone consolidated its international position mostly through the Italian diaspora, achieving a much wider reach than is ordinarily thought, both nationally and globally.     

Social practices and lifestyles in Italian youth cultures

Abstract

In recent decades, social research on youth in Italy has explored a wide range of issues through different interpretative and methodological approaches. However, there are very few studies that seek to identify the keynote features of the juvenile condition. This article argues that collective identities and forms of identification among youth are shaped more and more frequently through the sharing of social practices, of the meanings connected to these practices, and of more comprehensive lifestyles. With reference to four main fields (sport, music, politics, religion) and focusing on youth cultures, it analyses the connections between behaviours, attitudes, values and representations of youth actively involved in each of these different fields. The aim is to identify transversal processes through which young people today elaborate and adopt social practices and cultural profiles, create new social forms, and develop innovative signification processes.     

Networks and place in Montreal's independent music industry

The significance of networks for independent music producers has been well established in the urban‐economic geography literature and the literature centred on cultural industries. In this article, we seek to build on this literature by considering how place‐based attributes mediate network development; that is to say, how the unique characteristics of place (such as historical and cultural attributes) determine networking outcomes among spatially proximate actors. Specifically, we consider the importance of place through an examination of Montreal's independent music industry. Drawing on 46 semi‐structured interviews with key actors in the industry, we illustrate how Montreal's bilingual identity contributes to network dynamics within the industry.     

Trance and visibility at dawn: racial dynamics in Goa’s rave scene

The geography of music has recently turned to questions of embodiment and materiality to account for the sensuous specificity of music. Extending this work, this article emphasizes the constitutive work that embodied experience of music and space does for social differences such as race and gender. It criticizes what is perceived as a limited conception of embodiment in non-representational theory. Using ethnographic evidence from the rave tourism scene in Goa, India, it is argued that precisely during the scene's most mystical and hedonistic moments (what will be called the ‘morning phase’), racial dynamics are at their starkest. It is crucial to understand that racial difference is emergent and not automatic. The article then suggests a Deleuzian musicology which conceives music not as form, language or ideology, but as force. Accounting for the richness of musical materiality involves examining the networks of power and inequality through which it necessarily operates.     

Practices of judgement and domestic geographies of affect

This paper describes how practices of judgement take place from within the ‘life’ of ‘everyday life’. It does this, in part, to counter the assumption that the expression of taste necessarily acts as a strategy of distinction that creates hierarchized relations between different types of body. Instead the paper argues that considering practices to be of everyday life involves attuning to how different modalities of the more-than-rational are bound up with the making of value. This means, however, refusing to suspect the making of a judgement. In contrast, the paper exemplifies an ethos of engagement that functions affectively to discern traces of something better in these most judged of practices. Practices of judgement with music are thereafter disclosed as concerned with the momentary (re)ordering of what William Connolly (1999 Connolly, W. 1999. Why I Am Not a Secularist, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  [Google Scholar]) has termed ‘thought imbued intensities and feelings’. They occur from within the contradictory, often confused, affective imperatives that both circulate to pleat together everyday life and form the multiple, intersecting, topologies of affect that enact domestic time-space.     

Sonic geography in a nature region

This paper considers the sonic geography of a region since the late nineteenth century, taking material from the Norfolk Broads, a wetland region in eastern England. This area has been defined through competing cultures of nature and leisure, with the presence, absence and nature of sound a key concern. The theme of sonic geography is set within debates concerning the nature of regional identity, moral geographies of conduct in landscape, and uses of the term ‘soundscape’. The paper draws on surveys of sound, travel guides, press reports, private journals and fictional accounts, showing how in the contested valuation of a regional landscape the aesthetic, ecological and social are enfolded through sonic geography.     

The pastoral role of Contemporary Christian Music: the spiritualization of everyday life in a suburban evangelical megachurch

Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), popular music featuring evangelical Christian lyrics, is one of the most widely consumed forms of commercial entertainment for America's 70–80 million white evangelical Christians. CCM is an excellent lens through which to examine the complex interactions of religious faith, community sentiment, and popular music practices in the contemporary US. I explain how CCM performs the ‘pastoral’ task of reinforcing Christian faith in an evangelical megachurch in the suburbs of Sacramento, California. I argue that a monthly concert series not only guides evangelical Christians in their ‘walk’, but also helps constitute the flock by building a sense of community. I suggest three spatial analytics to understand CCM's pastoral role: the place of the suburb, the sacred space of the church coffeehouse, and the body. At all three scales of analysis, the musical and religious practices of CCM at one suburban church spiritualize the everyday lives of the participants.