Da "Music Scene" (Etymology?)

Since the ostensible focus of my year in Africa is “the music scene,” I’ve been meaning to jot down some music-related observations from the City of Peace.

First, a long side-note: I recently read this interesting (if too well-structured) article by Kay Shelemay called “Musical Communities: Rethinking the Collective in Music.”  She writes that in recent decades, ethnomusicologists have been forced to reconsider the term “community” as a unit of study; as our global population becomes increasingly diasporic, techni-centric and mobile, it becomes difficult to use “community” to refer to a group of people living in the same space and sharing the same histories and traditions.  Instead, “community” tends to be something imagined, flexible, instable, a term too generous in its possible applications to be used in any technically nominal sense.  Shelemay thinks that as the word “community” loses some of its relevance, social theorists have started to focus instead on “ patterns of mobility, that… provide new models for studying routes instead of roots.”  I love that idea of conceptualizing humans and their relationships as mobile, chartable, linear – as routes that intersect at times, routes that run parallel for long or short whiles, routes that get tangled into knots in those places where communities stabilize for a period.  It’s a conceptual model that accounts for both spatial and temporal change. 

In my personal conversations/relationships lately, it seems like people are taking stock of their lives and fleshing out their identities and describing their pasts in a way that resembles drawing constellations.  Very few people I know identify with just one or two locatable nodes on the globe, or “communities.”  Instead, they are multi-nodal people, with warm, important communities that they belong to (or belonged to) in different times and spaces.  To me, the interesting part of this personal-identity-model are the liminalities, the connecting threads, the parts of every person that tie all their home-spaces together, the phantom lines in the night sky that you draw between the stars to make a picture that makes sense.

Anyway, what I wanted to mention was how Shelemay identified alternative words that scholars are using to describe “musical communities” – terms that have more specificity than “community,” or at least have not been so hollowed-out.  These include:

(1)  Subculture (theorized by Mark Slobin, Dick Hebdige)
(2)  Art worlds (coined by Howard S. Becker)
(3)  Musical pathways (coined by Ruth Finnegan)
(4)  The music scene (theorized by Edward Said, Barry Shanks, Will Straw)

All of the above would potentially work as units of study, but the term “music scene” seemed to be the most applicable in Tanzania.  Will Straw describes “the music scene” as “a rubric that reconciles two contrary pressures: one towards the stabilization of local historical continuities, and the other which works to disrupt such continuities, to cosmopolitanize and relativize them…The point is not to designate particular cultural spaces as one or the other, but to examine the ways in which particular music practices produce a sense of community within the conditions of metropolitan music scenes.” 

I love that definition, because in Tanzania, most musical performances seem to espouse these seemingly-opposite impulses to (1) be proudly and uniquely Tanzanian, to rework historical national tropes into new sounds; and on the other hand, (2) to be modern and cosmopolitan, to de-Tanzania-ify the sounds, to create something with a broad-base appeal.  Many artists (especially in hip hop) are constantly trying to create sonic art that is self-complete and self-justifying, i.e. not reliant on historic-national context for its power; at the same time, every successful Tanzanian artist needs to be tuned-in to the national pulse, either engaging with issues of national consequence, or purposefully circumventing them.  With bands who perform in traditional Tanzanian styles (i.e. ngoma, kwaya), these contradictory impulses are not quite as obvious; their performances are, by definition, deeply embedded in national tradition, and the only hint of that second impulse is the desire to “update” their sound, to make their performance feel “fresh.”

Since that side-note went too long, I’ll write about actual TZ music in the next post!