Music Scenes

In an interview on The Ethnography of Music

Tell us about Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual.

This is a different book, compared to the others, because it is a reader. As an anthology its purpose is less to advance an exhaustive argument than it is to generate ideas and give a sense of evolving traditions, concerns and concepts. Thus, the beauty of this book comes from its own internal diversity. There are essays on the ‘tween scene’, on London’s salsa scene, on riot grrrl, on karaoke, etc. What holds all these essays together is the focus on the concept of ‘scene’. A scene is a lot of things: it’s a group of people, it’s a shared taste, it’s a system of rituals, of common values and practices, and it’s also a place. But of course scenes aren’t just anchored in places intended in the traditional sense: there are internet-based scenes, and also scenes that travel – like bluegrass communities, or like transplant scenes.

The authors argue that music scenes are good for the participants. In what way?

To a great extent this is one of the key concerns of all ethnographic research: music scenes are ways for people to make sense of the world around them, to give and find meaning in life. Music scenes are also ways that people have of building bonds with like-minded others. In this sense scenes give us meaning and they give us identities, a sense of who we are in relation to others.