Page 191 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

The local, the global, and the culture of music
Gilbert B.Rodman
■ Susan D.Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, Charles Keil and the Music in Daily Life
Project, My Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 218 pp.
$15.95 ISBN 0819562645 Pbk■ Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics
of the West (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 127 pp. $14.95 ISBN
0819562610 Pbk
On the surface, My Music and Subcultural Sounds describe two very different
projects: one empirical, the other theoretical; one focusing on what Barthes has
described as the ‘impossible science of the individual’ (quoted in Grossberg, 1988:
386), the other concentrating on ‘the big picture’ of all the ‘little musics’ of
EuroAmerica. At the heart of each of these volumes, however, lies a shared
assumption concerning the relationship between music and culture, as each starts
from the laudable premise that the role of music in contemporary society is far
more complex than it has typically been assumed to be: that the social, cultural,
and/or political significance of music is not something readily visible (or audible)
on the surfaces of its texts, in the nature of its production and distribution, or in
the various uses that its audiences make of it. For example, in his foreword to My
Music, George Lipsitz argues that most of the stories that we tell about why and
how music matters are ultimately inadequate accounts of the shape of the musical
terrain:

Expert musicologists, journalists, and social scientists have written many
important and interesting works about music, but only rarely have they
confronted the complicated and contradictory ways that people use music to
make meaning for themselves Musicologists, journalists, and social
scientists all illumine parts of the truth about music, but they have not as yet
produced an adequate way of understanding (and theorizing) how
interactions among artists, audiences, and apparatuses collectively create the
world of musical production, distribution, and reception.
(p. x)

Similarly, in outlining the larger project of Subcultural Sounds, Slobin describes
music as a constantly shifting, multi-faceted range of phenomena that has too
frequently been studied as if it were merely a static body of texts or a rigidly
bounded and well-defined set of practices:

We need to think of music as coming from many places and moving among
many levels of today’s societies, just as we have learned to think of groups
and nations as volatile, mutable social substances rather than as fixed units
for instant analysis…. There are no ‘simple’ societies any longer, yet
‘complex’ is too flat a word to describe the nestings and folding, the cracks
and the crannies of the lands of Euro-America Overall, the music of Euro-