• DOI:10.2307/852848
• Corpus ID: 147686704

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

@article{Gerstin1998ReputationIA,
  title={Reputation in a Musical Scene: The Everyday Context of Connections between Music, Identity and Politics},
  author={Julian Gerstin},
  journal={Ethnomusicology},
  year={1998},
  volume={42},
  pages={385-414}
}

• J. Gerstin
• Published 23 January 1998
• Art, Sociology
• Ethnomusicology

structed discourses such as those of politics, history, and identity. Anthony Seeger phrased this perspective as a "musical anthropology" in contrast to an earlier "anthropology of music" (1987). During the 1980s the field also incorporated postmodernism's emerging critique of anthropology for ignoring the politics embedded in symbolic production. Discussion of how global and national economics and ideologies touch even the most "traditional" 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 "process" rather than "product" (Blacking 1973), guided by performers' cultural understandings, and including social issues (interaction, authority, politics, race) as part of the musical process. It is this last inclusion--social issues as part of musical process-that strikes me as offering intriguing new possibilities for analyzing the role of ideas in performance.' Both books treat interaction between musicians as central to the 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 the urban jazz musicians Monson describes as it is of the traditional gamelan musicians in Brinner's book. It is in this context, through and in their in