Reputation in a Musical Scene: The Everyday Context of Connections between Music, Identity and Politics

Abstract

structed discourses such as those of politics, history, and identity. Anthony Seeger phrased this perspective as a in contrast to an earlier of (1987). During 1980s field also incorporated postmodernism's emerging critique of anthropology for ignoring politics embedded in symbolic production. Discussion of how global and national economics and ideologies touch even most music is now mainstream. Many works manage to do both-to show music making politics and politics making music. Nonetheless two recent books seem to me to convey an especially intimate sense of how this works from a musician's point of view. These are Benjamin Brinner's Knowing Music, Making Music (1995) and Ingrid Monson's Saying Something (1996) (as well as an earlier article, Monson 1990). Brinner and Monson undertake close analysis of the music itself treated as rather than product (Blacking 1973), guided by performers' cultural understandings, and including social issues (interaction, authority, politics, race) as part of musical process. It is this last inclusion--social issues as part of musical process-that strikes me as offering intriguing new possibilities for analyzing role of ideas in performance.' Both books treat interaction between musicians as central to process of making music. To a great extent, musicians' musical lives transpire in relatively small, face-to-face musical networks-this is as true of urban jazz musicians Monson describes as it is of traditional gamelan musicians in Brinner's book. It is in this context, through and in their in