Voices and Places: History, Repetition and the Musical Imagination

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which musicians participate in historical knowledge, through an analysis of the spatial metaphors that surround musical experience in two distinct urban locales in Algeria and Turkey. The article proposes an alternative to two approaches which have dominated the sociological and anthropological discussion of music: one which suggests that music simply reproduces social conditions; and another which suggests that it opposes them. Here I argue that the temporalities created through music constitute a form of engagement with experiences of time and history generated elsewhere. I have always found it difficult to disentangle the way I listen to places from the way I look at them. A point of view brings sounds into new juxtapositions and relationships, demanding that we attend to some sounds and ignore others. Sounds demand some kind of interpretation of the spaces they occupy and the position of the listener in relation to them. And whilst social experience insistently privileges the visual, and ethnographies unerringly continue to reproduce this fact (Clifford 1986: 11-12), what we know about ourselves and others and the spaces we create for ourselves is also built out of sounds. We forget these sounds, or pretend they are not there, to our disadvantage. I start with the proposal that we consider sounds and points of view, voices and places, as connected social experiences. This exercise raises a number of issues relating not only to the narrow focus of this article (the relationship of social and musical experience), but also to the