SETTING: THE STUDY OF LOCAL MUSICS
Master Ewe drummer Patience Dogba plays the atsimevu, holding a stick in her right hand and muting the drum head with her left hand as she accompanies the singing and dancing of the Milo Mianoewo funeral association in Accra, Ghana. She performs alongside her brothers Lucas and Kofitsey Tagborlo, who beat rhythms with sticks on the sides of their drums.
MAIN POINTS |
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• Every city, town, and village has its own distinctive musical profile.
• We can map the city’s soundscapes by asking what makes up musical life, where is music performed, when is music heard, who makes music, and why.
• Soundscapes existing side by side often interact.
• Soundscapes in different locales may share sounds, settings, and significances.
INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE STAGE
“Setting” in its broadest sense encompasses the multiple contexts—a city, a concert hall, a park, a home—in which music is conceived, created, transmitted, performed, and remembered. Since music is more than just sound, we take into account the broad sweep of history and the events of everyday social life.
In this chapter, we will discuss the soundscapes within several urban settings. Our focus here is music in the city rather than in rural settings for two main reasons. First, according to a report of the 2011 United Nations Population Fund, for the world’s seven billion people, the global rural–urban population balance “has tipped irreversibly in favor of cities.” 1 By 2030, the percentage of city dwellers is expected to reach 60 percent. Around 75 percent of the population of Europe, North America, South America, the Caribbean, and Oceania already lived in cities by the year 2000; by 2030 both Asia and Africa will have higher numbers of urban dwellers than other continents. Thus, cities—and increasing numbers of “megacities” with populations greater than ten million—will predominate more and more as settings for musical activity worldwide and as sites for musical research.
Second, wherever their location and whatever their size, most communities today are complex environments that include both distinctive local elements and music traditions from elsewhere. Even a small college campus in a rural location sustains multiple music cultures because of its diverse student population. Small towns also sustain surprisingly varied soundscapes, requiring us to apply many of the same methods to study them as we do to study larger urban areas. Although any environment can provide a stimulating laboratory for studying music, a central goal of Soundscapes is to awaken your interest in the musical world immediately around you.
Surprisingly, only in recent decades did scholars begin to explore the richness of urban musical life. These studies have focused on the music traditions of ethnic communities, or on musical events accessible in a wide variety of urban public places (see “Studying Music: Mapping the City”). We will focus on the widest possible variety of music traditions to discover the distinctive musical profile of a given locale. We will, in effect, map the city’s soundscapes. And at the same time, we will also use music to map the city. Through an investigation of local music, we will increase our understanding of what makes a particular urban area unique. For each city we study, we will answer a series of questions: What makes up urban musical life, where is music performed, when is music heard, who makes music, and why?
The failure to look broadly at urban musical life has reduced our appreciation of the many music cultures that exist side by side in most cities and towns, often sharing performance spaces as well as music, musicians, and audiences. By looking at the big picture in several urban centers, we can understand the ways in which a locale can attain its own distinctive profile while partaking of—and contributing to—the musical world beyond. In order to capture the many interactions in urban musical life, our discussions here will incorporate musics—including those labeled “popular” and “classical”—that have rarely been surveyed by musical ethnographers until recently. Many different music cultures are present in most places—for instance, Indian music and African American rap may be performed at the same festival on the same day—and it is important to study the relationship between these contrasting traditions.
STUDYING MUSIC |
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MAPPING THE CITY
Ethnomusicologists were slow to discover the rich musical life of cities; only in the last quarter of the twentieth century did they recognize the potential for ethnographic research and carry out fieldwork there. In developing the new subfield of urban ethnomusicology, scholars began by focusing on individual ethnic communities and their music. By the mid-1980s, ethnomusicologists were giving increasing attention to various musics such as rock, rap, and country that are found in urban and rural areas in the United States and abroad.
There are only a few models to guide us in mapping multiple music traditions in a single locale. The most detailed and large-scale study of the music of a single city is Ruth Finnegan’s book The Hidden Musicians, a study of amateur musicmaking in the author’s hometown of Milton Keynes, England.2 Finnegan took a close look at what she called the “musical worlds” of her community, which are very similar to the music cultures that constitute our soundscapes. Finnegan’s musical worlds however, are almost exclusively of European or American origin, including classical music, brass band music, folk music, musical theater, jazz, country and western music, and rock and pop. Finnegan focused not on professional musicians, but on amateur musical life, observing that amateurs’ musical activities are often hidden from both the community at large and musicians who are not involved in them.
We will cast our net wider to investigate international music traditions represented within a single locale, as well as musical activity by both professionals and amateurs, but we can learn a great deal from Finnegan’s work. Particularly useful is Finnegan’s concept of “pathways,” a term she uses to refer to familiar and regular activities, such as work, worship, or recreation, that an individual undertakes in the course of everyday life. Musicmaking is a pathway too often overlooked, constituting for many a regular, part-time group activity that carries substantial meaning for its participants. Finnegan emphasizes that musical pathways are always changing, and people form new pathways to follow, as they maintain and transform longtime ensembles or establish new singing groups or bands. Musical pathways, suggests Finnegan, provide “an invisible structure” through which people choose to conduct their lives.
Here we will explore the soundscapes of three cities in order to attain a comparative perspective, looking briefly at musical life in an African and an Indian urban area before exploring a North American city in more depth. Our three cities have been chosen because, although they are of different sizes and locations, they share aspects of economic and political history and they sustain multicultural populations. Located on different continents, all three are coastal towns whose character has been shaped by their role as ports. At different moments in their histories, all have been under British colonial domination. This trio therefore presents both similarities and differences; each sustains distinctive local traditions while borrowing from other places around the globe and in turn influencing the content of soundscapes worldwide. All three have been over the course of time central to the music history of their respective countries and regions, and continue to play vital roles today. Our three cities are Accra, Mumbai, and Boston.
