Local musicking: new pathways for ethnomusicology

Abstract

Within ethnomusicology, music has tended to be viewed from a regional perspective, particularly in relation to traditional and popular repertories, such that, generally speaking, these repertories are associated with their geographical origins (e.g., Gaucho nativist movement, Irish traditional music and so on). However, in 1989 the British anthropologist Ruth Finnegan published 'The Hidden Musician: Music-making in an English Town', a meticulous study of musical practices in Milton Keynes (UK), a planned city founded in the 1970s. Although many of these practices were apparently invisible given their amateur and "local" character, Finnegan calculated that approximately 5% of the habitants of Milton Keynes were involved regularly in performative musical activities. Among the spheres of "local music" she identified in the city were: the British folk music revival, but also brass bands, choirs and local orchestras, rock and pop bands and even the "country and western" movement that was popular in Milton Keynes at the time of her research. If she were conducting the investigation today, she would certainly have included the "samba bands", gamelans, belly-dancing troupes, among other globalized practices that are part of the musical scenes of many British towns today.Her work shows how local musical activities can involve styles whose origins transcend the limits of the locality of their performance. Yet they bring together people who live and move about in the same geographical space. Furthermore, Finnegan argued that local music plays a central role in the organization of local social life. It is present at weddings, graduations, religious and civic ceremonies, night life; rarely is there a communal social event without music, and at many such contexts it is provided by inhabitants of the locality. Finnegan's research centers on music worlds linked to musical performance. However, here we are concerned with a broader universe of musical practice, or that which Christopher Small (1989) called "musicking". For Small, musicking encompasses any form of engagement with music. Thus, musical performance is a form of musicking, but one also "musics" when one hears music, talks about music, downloads music, or even when one participates in the organization of a musical show or engages in tasks associated with the commerce of music.Like Finnegan, however, we privilege the musical choices made by people engaging in a musical domain, given that we understand that this perspective anticipated some of the themes that now animate debates in ethnomusicology, such as: the study of music scenes, regardless of the origins of the style in question; the musical construction of identity; music in everyday life, a theme that encompasses recorded musics as well as musical performance; musical amateurism and community musicking; music globalization, localization and "glocalization", among other themes. Despite their differences, all these themes invoke, in some way, that which Arjun Appaduai called the "production of locality", in which locality is understood as a value that is realized in social interactions and their forms of mediation, creating - and being created by - relations among people and the spaces they inhabit and in which they move, whether physically or as modes of the imaginary. We propose, therefore, that a focus on local musical practices - or on local musicking - has the potential to create a new paradigm for current musicologies, (AU)