Making music offers enormous possibilities--and faces significant limitations--in its power to generate belonging and advance social justice. Tony Perman and Stefan Fiol edit essays focused on the forms of interplay between music-making and community-making as mutually creative processes. Contributors in the first section look at cases where music arrived in settings with little or no sense of community and formed social bonds that lasted beyond its departure. In the sections that follow, the essayists turn to stable communities that used musical forms to address social needs and both forged new social groups and, in some cases, splintered established communities. By centering the value of difference in productive feedback dynamics of music and community while asserting the need for mutual moral indebtedness, they foreground music's potential to transform community for the better. Contributors: Stephen Blum, Joanna Bosse, Sylvia Bruinders, Donna A. Buchanan, Rick Deja, Veit Erlmann, Stefan Fiol, Eduardo Herrera, David A. McDonald, Tony Perman, Thomas Solomon, and Ioannis Tsekouras
Tony Perman is an associate professor of ethnomusicology and the department chair of music at Grinnell College. He is the author of Signs of the Spirit: Music and the Experience of Meaning in Ndau Ceremonial Life. Stefan Fiol is a professor of ethnomusicology and affiliated faculty in Asian Studies at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of Recasting Folk in the Himalayas: Indian Music, Media, and Social Mobility.
Table of Contents List of Figures Prologue Bruno Nettl 1. Introduction: Music Making and Unmaking Community Stefan Fiol and Tony Perman Part I: Differentiation 2. Re-membering Pontic Sociality: Musical Longing as Community Surrogation Ioannis Tsekouras 3. Choreographic Participation of a Presentational Kind: Sound, Movement, and the Politics of Belonging in Bulgaria's Armenian Diaspora Donna A. Buchanan 4. Making a Jewish Neighborhood: In-group/Out-group Sonic Dynamics and Affective Leverage in an Argentine Soccer Stadium Eduardo Herrera 5. Assembling Indigenous Communities: The Making of South Africa's Intellectual Property Laws Amendment Act 2013 Veit Erlmann Part II: Feedback 6. Teaching Music as Social Life: Performance Based Pedagogy in Ethnomusicology Joanna Bosse 7. Musical Competition as Community in Highland Bolivia Thomas Solomon 8. Sustaining Musical Collectivities Through Competition: Christmas Bands in Cape Town Sylvia Bruinders 9. Festival Activism: Sound, Affect, and Participatory Politics at the Palestine Music Expo David A. McDonald Part III: Mutual Indebtedness 10. Love and Debt: Performing Difference on the Mbira Tony Perman 11. From Collective Improvisation to Pan-African Jazz: Examining the Dialogue of Musical Sounds and Social Belonging Rick Deja 12. Visions of Community and the Perils of Safeguarding a Himalayan Festival Stefan Fiol Epilogue Stephen Blum Index
"A rich and disjunctive tapestry of studies that reifies neither communities nor ontologies of community. The entire collection goes to the heart of Tom Turino's assertions about the power of music to do things in the world and, more specifically, to shape social collectivities through meaning and emotion."--Anna Schultz, author of Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism
