The Art of Doing (Geographies Of) Music

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2007, volume 25, pages 867 ^ 889
DOI:10.1068/d416t
The art of doing (geographies of ) music
Nichola Wood
School of Geography, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT, England;
e-mail: n.x.wood@leeds.ac.uk
Michelle Duffy
The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne, 149 Barry Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053,
Australia; e-mail: med@unimelb.edu.au
Susan J Smith
Department of Geography, University of Durham, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE, England;
e-mail: susanj.smith@durham.ac.uk
Received 31 August 2005; in revised form 20 April 2006
Abstract. Like every other work of art, music has become the stuff of social research: it has been
interrogated for its economy, its politics, and its role in elaborating human life. Music has its
geographies too: its cultural landscapes; its positioning in a soundworld; its embodiment; its materi-
ality. But, intriguingly, until recently musical methodologies have remained half formed, fragmentary,
hidden, elusive, out of sight, beyond words. This is partly a result of disciplinary histories and an
unhelpful division of intellectual labour; it is partly an expression of what music is. This paper is a
performance enacted to assemble the field of musical methodologies: to enlarge its scope; to engage
with its strengths and limitations; to animate the soundworld; to participate in the art of doing and
being (geographies of ) music.
Ether, or?
From: 5 susanj.smith@durham.ac.uk 4
To: med@unimelb.edu.au, n.x.wood@leeds.ac.uk
Subject: Musical Methodologies
When I wrote that earlier article for Environment and Planning D, two of the referees
asked for a fuller methodological statement. Intriguingly, there is still nothing out there
to fill that gap.
From: 5 n.x.wood@leeds.ac.uk 4
To: susanj.smith@durham.ac.uk, med@unimelb.edu.au
Subject: Re: Musical Methodologies
There's certainly not enough literature engaging with the sonic experience of music.
Analysing lyrics and interviewing performers is one thing; but, as we know from
experience, engaging with sound is far more of a challenge.
From: 5 med@unimelb.edu.au 4
To: n.x.wood@leeds.ac.uk, susanj.smith@durham.ac.uk,
It's that lack of attention to the musical `moment' that's so vexing. Why don't we write a
piece that engages practically with a conception of music which goes beyond the
notes on a page? Let's put musical performance at the very heart of our endeavour.
868 N Wood, M Duffy, S J Smith
From: 5 med@unimelb 4 5n.x.wood@leeds 4 5 susanj.smith@durham 4

To: Readers@Society and Space
So this is an attempt to interrogate musical performance, in part performatively.
Stacey Holman Jones (1998) experimented with this in her paper on women's music
clubs. The article is itself a (textual) performance: open ended, imaginative, impulsive;
you don't even know whether it's all `fact' or partly fictionalised. Our approach is like
that too: we aim to performöin one spaceöa series of individual research projects
whose settings are in practice quite diverse; and we are analysing an interview we
held with ourselves, precisely to talk aboutöindeed to feel our way throughöideas
that may be unspeakable and that are certainly stripped of substance the moment
we write them down.(1)
Music is often portrayed as something that is seen rather than heard or felt, and
it is generally described ö or represented ö as something that has happened in the
past (whether the music in question is recorded or live) (see Berendt, 1985). There are
some notable exceptions to this, including pathbreaking research by DeNora (2000),
Jones (1998), Smith and Brett (1998), and some of the papers collected in a recent
issue of Social and Cultural Geography (Anderson et al, 2005). But, by and large,
social scientists tend to distance themselves from the ephemeral, if creative, aspects
of musical performances, preferring, instead, to fix and objectify musical events in
various ways. That is not to denigrate work that examines music as an economic
commodity (Duffett 2000; Gibson and Connell, 2005); a cultural signifier (Lehr,
1983; Neuenfeldt, 1997; Revill, 2000); an expression of identity (Connell and Gibson,
2003; Dunbar-Hall and Gibson, 2004; Kong, 1996; Saldanha, 2002); a political action
(Carroll and Connell, 2000; Gibson, 1998; Lahusen, 1993; McLeay, 1997); and so on.
It is, rather to point out that, for all these approaches achieve, they contain few
answers to the thorny issue of how to explore and experiment with what music is
and how it works as music in the world. Even academic musicologists such as Cook
(1999), McClary and Walser (1990), and Shepherd and Wicke (1997), for example, are
critical of the extent to which, within their own musical disciplines, scholars have
distanced themselves from the sensual and emotional experience of participating in,
or practising and creating, musical events (whether as performers, listeners, or
audience members).
In our own research, in contrast, we have each tried to work with a conception of
music that emphasises its being and doing ö its nonrepresentational, creative, and
evanescent qualities (Duffy, 2005; Smith, 2000a; Wood, 2004). Each of us has experi-
mented with tactics, techniques, approaches, and engagements in an attempt to
apprehend, explore, and understand what musical performance is all about (compare
Duffy et al, 2001). Our findings might be read as a contribution to the wider
literature on performance as method (see Latham, 2003; McCormack, 2005; Revill,
2004; Smith, 2001): as a musical experiment with nonrepresentational practices
that brings together materiality and thinking in some wide-ranging ways (Thrift,
2003). But we present what we have done, rather, as a contribution specifically to
the musical qualities of method ö to the issue of how to take seriously the extent
(1) Ourtextual strategy includes: (1) creating a pastiche of ethnographic work from our individual
research projects, which tells one story about the various `musical methods' we have experimented
with; (2) analysing a discussion between ourselves, recorded over two days in Edinburgh in April
2000, as a form of autocritique, reflecting on what we have achieved, how we achieved it, and what
remains to be done. These two textual modes are differentiated by font.
The art of doing (geographies of ) music 869
to which, as Bohlman puts it, ``thinking about and experiencing music are basic
human practices'' (1999, page 33). More specifically, our concern in this paper is to
tease out how these basic human musical practices make place. Consequently, we are
concerned both with how to study, or how to carry out research, with music and its
making (and how to engage with what music making makes), and with how to
(re)present these deliberations.
To this end, our performance is in one sense a fiction: an imagined event, occupy-
ing an imaginary space in an imagined day, in the life of three real programmes of
research. In these diverse projects, set in concert halls, theatres, churches, clubs, and in
the muddy open air, all three of us have been ``chasing shadows in the field'' (Cooley,
1997, page 3) in search of musical figments whose reality vanishes as soon as we
examine them closely (see Small, 1998, page 2), perhaps leaving `traces' to reflect on,
perhaps not (Bohlman, 1999). Our common aim has been to engage with music itself:
with the way it is made, heard, encountered, and experienced. We are not particularly
seeking to define what music is: this is complex, contested, and already widely
discussed (Bohlman, 1999; Cook, 1990). Nor are we offering a systematic review of
musical methodology. Rather, we are interested in how to engage with music as it, and
all that it is entangled into, becomes; we are concerned with how music constitutes an
elaboration of the new (a moment of creative endeavour that is temporally original and
unrepeatable) which emerges out of and in response to a whole range of material,
social, cultural, and economic relations (see Bergson, 1983; Deleuze, 1988; Grosz,
1999a). In this we are sympathetic to Small's (1998) argument that there is no such
thing as music, only the practices of musicking.(2) It is the materials, meanings,
production, experience, and doing of music that matters. To explore this, as the paper
unfolds, we confront, more or less in turn, the following four themes. First, we
discuss the materiality of music, and, in particular, its materialisation in place.
Musicking is entangled with the history, architecture, `fabrication', acoustic, and
reverberation of spaces and places. Doing music is being there. Second, we take
soundings: we recognise that music is practised, quite literally; and we argue that
how bodies, instruments, and musical texts are prepared for musicking is part and
parcel of how life goes on. Third, we attend to musical practice, to the embodiment
of music in performance, to the kind of world that is elaborated through sound.
Fourth, we reflect on the affective geographies of music: elements of musicking that
are evident throughout the paper but which issue a fundamental methodological
challenge which merits special attention.
Musical materials
Music making is a material practice: it is embodied and technologised; it is staged;
it takes place. Said, writing of concert events, notes that they `àre always located in a
uniquely endowed site and what occurs then and there is part of the cultural life of
modern society'' (1991, page xv). Such spaces, as Crang and Thrift remind us, are not
simply containers of activity, they are a process in process; space and time are combined
in becoming (see 2000, page 3). The physical space for music makingöfor musical
performanceöis, then, a potential: a thing that is performed and so always in the
making.
(2) `Musicking'is a term devised by Small that refers to ``taking part, in any capacity in a musical
performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or by practising, by providing
material for performance (what is called composition), or by dancing'' (1998, page 9).
Speaking of venues ...

Smith: `Ìf we think of space as performed, then it's always in the making. You can
go there in the morning and think that it's this silent, empty space, but it's not,
it's already constituted by, you know, the fact that it's been built as a concert hall.
Already been configured as a concert hall. So, in a sense, it's not an empty space
waiting to be filled, it's a something ... which is a becoming . ...We're going to think
about all of the becomings that are going to be worked through in that space''
(authors' discussion).
What can be worked through, practised, performed is shaped in important ways by
the materiality of musical spaces. How and why the space for musicking is constituted
has a bearing on who makes music, who hears it, and how it is heard. Consider these
reflections on early, folk and festival music making:
Smith: ``Why else is the concert there? ... The music's going to be in that space
because somebody's decided to promote it. So why have they chosen that
space?''
Duffy: ``... it would plug into the local area ... .They're looking at what would draw
people into that space.''
Wood: ``... Certain performers can only afford to play in certain venues ... and the
type of venue that it's in will be in a type of area as well, so that in itself will attract a
different type of person''.
Smith: ``... and has the performance been altered in any way because of this?
[notes a group's frustrations following a tour of Spain] all these fantastic churches
and they keep putting them in, like, conference rooms with low ceilings and
carpets ... . So already the space is interacting with the concert ... who it's going
to attract in terms of audience, how suitable it's going to be for the music ...''
Much of this entanglement between the sounds of music and their material con-
stitution can be approached using the existing lexicon of ethnographic methods. An
extract from Duffy's field notes shows how similar free concerts, promoted to enlarge
the audience for an upcoming festival weekend, were constituted differently by their
positionings.
``(1) Busking in the shopping district on a Thursday evening ö the traditional evening
for families to shop.
The performers, mainly folk club members, set up a temporary stage across the road
from the Kmart complex. Only very few shoppers stopped to listen, many merely glance
across as they headed towards their cars. The small audience that was present was
made up of folk club members and their families, including eight young children who
enthusiastically jumped around to the reels and jigs played. No program was set, people
got up and performed when they wanted. So although an acoustic folk space was
created, an audienceöoutside of those from the folk club ödid not eventuate.
(2) Lunch time concert on the lawns outside the Civic Centre.
This appeared to be more successful than the busking held the previous evening,
as an audience of around one hundred people were present (although the numbers
varied over the course of the afternoon). Groups of families and friends, seated under
the shade of the trees planted along the edge of the lawns, enjoyed picnic lunches
and chatted while the performers were introduced and played. Many called out their
appreciation ...'' (Duffy, field notes).
This is not the place to account for such differences: the point is to recognise their
salience, as an impetus to trace out the complex entanglement of musicöits effects and
affectsöwith place. Apart from obvious restrictions, such as size, availability, and ease
of access, the venue of the concert is a material influence on how performances are
staged and heard. But, as Leyshon et al (1995) recognised in principle, over a decade
ago, space and place are not simply
``sites where or about which music happens to be made, or over which music has
diffused, but rather different spatialities are suggested as being formative of the
sounding and resounding of music . ... To consider the place of music is not to
reduce music to its location, to ground it down into some geographical baseline,
but to allow a purchase on the rich aesthetic, cultural, economic and political
geographies of musical language'' (1995, pages 424 ^ 425).
So it is also important to pay attention to the extent to which the physical spaces of,
and for, musical performance are shaped by the practices, aspirations, and indeed
power relations of those involved in organising and arranging musical events. Method-
ologically, one reason why this kind of material consideration has attracted rather
limited attention is the pessimism built into the ideas of some key theorists. Attali
and Adorno, for example, both see the structures of musical performance as part of the
exploitative commodification of life itself, so they interpret the spaces of the concert
hallöof any venue in which money is madeöas both the embodiment and instrument
of this exploitative imbalance (see Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979; Attali, 1985). It is the
money that drives the materials and meaning of performance. But, with Said's (1991)
openness to the elaborative social role of musicking and Deleuze and Guattari's (1987)
engagement with the transcoding between spaces (opening up radical possibilities for
otherwise conventional settings), there is a renewed sensitivity to the nonmonetary
values of music (see, for example, Cumming, 2000; Kong, 1996). This may lend new
impetus for attending to the placing of musical performance, in ways which are at least
introduced in Smith (2000b). More generally, interviews with concert organisers and
promoters, and audio-ethnographies carried out at the performance space before,
during, and after musical events, do not just provide clues about how performances
are set up and/or staged in particular ways to appeal to certain audiences, but they can
also tell us something about the manipulation, mutation, and management of material
space within a musical event (see Jones, 1998).
There is still, of course, the challenge of recognising that performing spaces
are controlled ö are crisscrossed by power plays ö in subtle and not so subtle ways
which certainly affect the way music is made, heard, and experienced. On the one
hand, there is an extent to which this is deliberate and explicit: placing music is
often about marking space and claiming identity. Consider these field notes, which
began as an account of musicking and ended up testifying to the power of a local
`brand'.
A: `Ìt's a local celebration ... it brings out and shows off all the different things going
on in the local area. It sort of establishes an identity for Brunswick itself. It's been
very underrated as a central location, its access to the main centres of Melbourne.
Once Brunswick's name gets around, whether it's a folk festival or music festival or
whatever ö some identityö people will come to recognise its convenience.''
B: ``... it's a day off, you know, they talk to each other, they have a chance to advertise
what they're doing.''
C: ``... I've learnt a lot about what's on here, you know, what's available in Brunswick.''
D: `Ìt highlights Brunswick's unique features, such as its varied cultural background.''
E: `ìt allows people to identify as a community while still recognising the ethnicity of
the people. The fact that it's local and that it is representative of the community ... .''
F: ``... it helps everybody to socialise with everybody else'' (Duffy, field notes).
On the other hand, there is also an extent to which the power structures through which
music is placed constitute a kind of ethopolitics, regulating access and behaviour by
appeal to good citizenship and responsible concerting. Talking about the mix of venue
observation and audience interviewing in our collected work, we reflect here on the
uncanny extent to which the spaces for musicking are regulated.
Smith: `` it does exert this uncanny power over people to do things they would
never usually do [such as turning up on time].''
Wood: `Ànd then you're all called into the auditorium ... there's a list of rules and
regulations on the door as you go in, you know, no mobile phones, no audio-
equipment, no photographs ... .''
Duffy: ``You're shown to your seat.''
Wood: `Ì sat at the front and I tried looking behind, and the looks I was getting
from people! It was, like, `well, why are you looking at me? The performance is
that way'.''
Smith: ``People are much more regulated than they would allow themselves to be
in any other setting ... it's actually one of the most regimented things you do.''
The musicologist Smith notes (1992) that the association of sound with place
reflects both musical competencies and learned cultural responses: what we hear is
influenced by how we are allowed, and have been taught, to hear (see also Becker,
2001). The spatial and social rules of etiquette obeyed at the concert, and the assump-
tions made about music and its setting, are part of this. The point of attending to
the place of music is not, however, just that performers and audiences have certain
expectations when they arrive at a particular venue, or that they are attracted to
particular sites for that reason. Neither is it simply about the way venuesöspaces,
structures, technologiesöshape and regulate the way people engage with the music,
the performers, and one another (see Duffy, 2000; 2005; Johnson, 1995; Wood, 2004).
The point is that the material spaces of musicötheir fabric, their economy, their
socialityöare also what music is.
Smith: ``... you tend to want to make this moot distinction between the music and
the other sounds [yet] ... when we go into this `silent' space that's got nobody in,
there's already this soundscape which is part of what will be there tonight ... .
If it rains tonight, there's going to be rain on the windows, if there's a pause in
the music tonight there's going to be ... the sound of life ...'' (authors' discussion).
It is, as we call it, `that John Cage thing' that demands more serious attention in
social and musicological research;(3) how do the complex entanglements of material
settings with musical sounds take place? Music shapes and creates space through both
its acoustical properties and its cultural codes (through the symbolic structures
embedded within the way these sounds are assembled). Intriguingly, far more is known
(3) Musicologists are engaged in endless debates over what makes sound into music, and partic-
ularly over whether music can be distanced from `natural' sounds with reference to physical
properties such as fixed pitch (Hanslick, 1974). The composer John Cage, however, established,
with his controversial 4 0 330 0 of `silence', that making music is ``not so much a matter of designing
musically interesting sounds as such, as of creating contexts in which creating sounds will be heard
as musically interesting'' (Cook, 1990, page 12).
about its cultural codes than its acoustical properties, and very little work directly tackles
the link between the two. To address this imbalance, a sociotechnical systems approach
might be more useful than conventional social anthropologyöa methodology allowing for
the actancy of things, recognising that musicking is about materials as well as about
meanings and that both can flow from objects as well as from humans. As Cooley argues,
``musical meaning is often ambiguous or liminal'', inviting the researcher into `à dialogue
of multiple realities'' (1997, page 3), which includes the fabric of a style of musicking which
brings spaces, peoples, places ìnto form'. Fraser (2005) takes this a step further in her
analysis of Bruce Gilchrist's ``Thought Conductor #2'' (part of his artEMERGENT
project). This musicöwhich starts when an individual is hooked up to an electroencepha-
logramöis not just everything that happens in and through a performance, not just the
epitome of, an entrëe into life; rather `ìt is itself alive'' (page 184).
A site which gathers up this momentum in more familiar ways is, of course, the
body, especially the performing body with its own markings, its instrumental exten-
sions, its wiring into technology, and its physical capabilities. As Cottrell (2005) shows
(among many other fascinating things) in his engaging account of professional music
making in London, musicians work with their bodies to make sounds that are in some
settings distinctiveöunique markers of individuality and identityöand which, in other
circumstances, blend in. The materiality of the bodyöits movements in space, its
relation to other bodies and objects, its soundings öis also about the becoming of
spaces of musical possibility, às-if'' spaces, in which the old is practised and the new
appears as `à living demonstration of skills we have but cannot ever articulate fully in
the linguistic domain'' (Thrift, 2000, pages 234 ^ 235). The immersion of our bodies
within music problematises the experience of self as separate and individualised; sound
passes through and into the body, making personal boundaries porous and emphasis-
ing the sociality of self (Kahn, 1999). This is what Romän-Veläzquez hints at in her
discussion of how ``the embodiment of Salsa develops through specific practices
whereby instruments, performance techniques, vocal sounds, bodily movements and
ways of dressing are encoded and experienced as part of a particular Latin identity''
(1999, page 128).
The materiality of music is underexplored. Performing places are material spaces
with specific histories, locations, and fabrications. They provide acoustical contexts
that are irretrievably entangled into particular social, cultural, economic, and political
frames. Musicking is placed for reasons of affordability, accessibility, convenience, and
potential. Seating has to be arranged, bodies toned, instruments tuned, technologies
mobilised, sound systems wired, lighting rigged. And all this is part of the substance of
sound; all this is (part of ) what constitutes music. The material spaces of musical
performance have an actancy of their own, an effectivity that remains to be specified.
What we turn to next, however, are the practices that both embellish and exceed this
material infrastructure: we turn to the way musicking inhabits, enlivens, invigorates,
revises, and reconstitutes the world.
Soundings
It is not just the venue that is prepared for performance. Music is practised. Method-
ologically, this provides scope to take soundings: to consider how sounds are produced;
to trace the way they are made into music. All performanceöwhether on stage or in
the course of everyday lifeöhas elements of creativity and spontaneity, and we shall
consider this later. For now, we are concerned to establish that the many facets of
musicking do not emerge from a vacuum any more than they are practised on the head
of a pin.
An obvious place in which to take soundings is in rehearsals. Rehearsals assemble

the elements of a musical event, offering an experimental space where sounds are put
together and taken apart, played with, argued over. This seems a good position from
which to think about what music is and how to access it. Again, a fair starting point
is conventional ethnography, which, on the whole, serves to establish just how
ordinary musicking is (Cottrell, 2005). It is not a world apart, but an integral part
of everyday life: it is as mundane (and as special) a process of social elaboration as
working, homemaking, playing, or politicking. This is not to denigrate the role that
music can play in relieving the drudgery and dullness of daily routines (Anderson,
2004a; Jones, 2005). Rather, our point here is that practices of musicking, which
might be considered mundane or routine by musicians, are a necessary part of
preparing a musical event. Here is a glimpse of the moments before any musical
sound is uttered. The instrumentalists, we noted, `àre not at this stage showing any
signs of their artistry...''
`Ìn these minutes before the rehearsal starts, the musicians are very casualö doing the
crossword, eating a sandwich, joking with one another (one singer produces a new
black shirt, still in its box with what looks like a dog-collar holding the actual collar
in place: `someone told me it was vicars and tarts', he quips '' (Smith, field notes).
More generally, talking about our work with performers we note:
Smith: `` This is their life. This comes home quite forcefully to me. They're there
because they want to do the music, but they're there because this is what they
do.''
Wood: `` They're professionals.''
Smith: `` So they turn up with their sandwiches ... I mean, they're not these ...sort of
`world apart' people are they? ... [reflecting on a rehearsal for a classical programme
in a major concert venue] there was a gap between the rehearsal and the concert,
and half a dozen of them [the performers] went to see Star Wars, and I thought `this
doesn't really fit ...''
Duffy: ``... people think that music is this rarified thing [but] ... we show that they do
other things as well. There are interruptions ...'' (authors' discussion).
Of course, as one of us pointed out more than a decade ago (Smith, 1994), conventional
ethnography is not geared to the sonic aspects of musicking, so, as a musical method,
it does require an audio-dimension. This is an issue which Morton (2005) attends to
quite explicitly. We use it here to alert ourselves to some different aspects of a rehearsal
spaceöthe hearing qualities of a venue which we have so far only seen.
``Quiet has been called for in the rehearsal, but it is not quiet. I can hear the whine of a
drill and an electronic buzz in the background, a production person wanders about the
stage, doors open and shut, someone ... thumps along the rows of seats in the stalls,
dropping pamphlets ... (this is particularly annoying)'' (Smith, field notes).
It draws attention, too, to the experimentation and adjustment that take place as
musicians negotiate and engage with the physical properties of performing spaces.
In discussion we note:
Smith: `` They are aware of how the physical space influences what they are
going to do ... . If they're wanting a note to sound for a particular amount of
time: if it's in a big acoustic they'll play it for a moment; if it's in a place with
carpets and curtains, they'll play it for the whole length ...'' (authors' discussion).
Soundings, however, do not amount to music.

Duffy: `` They're sort of plotting where they're going to go.''
Wood: `Àural soundmarks ... they play bits of it and it's not whole.''
Smith: `` It's a kind of patchwork of sounds. Almost disembodied.''
Duffy: `` Or disembedded. Because it's disrupting that flow in time; it's actually
chopping out bits.''
Wood: ``... its disjointed and distracting.''
Smith: `` There's also that notion of restraint ... you don't play the high notes ... you
do the beginnings and cadences so that people know where you are ... you don't
put a load of ornaments in, you save those ... .''
Duffy: `` It's an approximation of the music ... .''
Smith: ``... the markings rather than the making'' (authors' discussion).
For more about music itself, it is tempting to leap onto the stage and look at the
parts: to find inspiration from the notes on the page. Certainly, it is easy once one
is immersed in this kind of research to understand why musicologists have turned
to scores and notation. Music as text is (or seems) much easier to pin down. You
can find it when you want to, it is basically the same every time you look at it,
and ö apart from a few rehearsal notes ö it is not all mixed up with the performers'
idiosyncrasies.(4)
Most people, however, cannot hear a musical score, unless they are themselves
highly trained musicians. And, even then, reading texts has no acoustical properties.
Notation is text, not sound. It is a representation waiting to be interpreted. Interest-
ingly, commonsense understandings of the interpretation of music generally refer to
a performative rather than to a reflective activity, and musical texts are at best a
starting point for this (see Bohlman, 1999; Small, 1998). To an extent, this can be
approached only as it happens, and we turn to this later. But methodologically
one other kind of space offers an opportunity to work with the ideas which drive
musicking: the recording studio.
For many professional musicians, part of the `preparation' for any concert is a
recording. Music is a business, and live music is increasingly dependent on the success
of the recording industry. Certainly, if musicians are to be paid for rehearsing a
particular programme, it makes (financial) sense to harness this creativity in as many
ways as possible. In some genres, for example, recording music is quite literally about
making musicöas `perfectly' as possible (see Chanan, 1994; Kahn and Whitehead,
1992; Kealy, 1990). By participating in, or listening to, a recording session this process
is laid out quite starkly, as the sound engineer, the producer, and the conductor all
move very explicitly towards what they want.
``The sound engineer manages the technology. It takes him 40 minutes to set up
for the first piece. During this time he is active all the while, diving from side to
side of his instrument panel, scooting outside, or sending an assistant to adjust
microphones ... . The number of input channels reflects a balance between getting
àmbience' from the performance space and getting definition for groups of instrumen-
talists and singers. At one point he raises the central stereo pairs to get `more
ambience', and he moves microphones and people backwards and forwards to balance
up the sound.''
(4) Although, this is not to say that studying musical texts is unproblematic. As Boorman states, the
``written or printed musical text is an object to be mistrusted at every turn. It elicits trust exactly
when belief should be suspended, and is subjected to questioning at many points where investigation
is needless'' (1999, page 403).
Then the producer and conductor negotiate over the musicality of the sound:
`Àfter the first take ... one listener [an instrumentalist who is not in the piece but sitting
in the recording `box'] says `can you hear the strings?' The sound engineer is about to
make an adjustment when [the conductor] says `but this is a realistic sound, because
this is a congested piece, it's the muddiest piece we are recording ...' ''
Producer: ``but it needs to have a blocky effect'' [he means that the sound should be
more distinct and the phrases more together].
Conductor: ``Yes, but we want to be musical with it.''
`Òn another occasion, the producer asks a section of instruments to play more quietly,
and the conductor counters `don't play softer, stand further away from the micro-
phones ... it's appropriate that this piece should have a mist over it'. And again, when
the producer asks for a replay of something the conductor is pleased with, the con-
ductor says `come on, let's do exactly the same again and hope he doesn't notice' ''
(Smith, field notes).
In this example both the sound engineer and the producer are musically experienced
and skilled. There is, nevertheless, a tension between performing music `musically' and
the practice of capturing that sound and fixing it for all to hear (see Middleton, 1990).
``The producer says things like `that was 100% fine, but wasn't the introduction too
polite?'; ìs the sound too fluid?'; `can you make it sound more interesting?'; `that A
was flatöreally unpleasant .' ...The conductor asks for qualities like excitement, pathos,
wilder playing and articulations `to make the music shine'. He talks emotively and in
metaphors'' (Smith, field notes).
The language across the board, however, is that of piecing or pasting a whole
together. The conductor, for example, often says things such as ``we'll run through
it a couple of times and see what there is to mend.'' Some `mending' involves players
launching into highly expressive passages as if they had been building up to it, and,
despite the physical and mental toll this can take, it may be that the effect the player
wants is not the one that ends up on the recording.
`Òn one occasion an instrumentalist was told twice that his ornamentation was not in
time. He agreed that the first couple of takes this had been the case, but in the last two,
he claimed that he had got it right. The producer disagreed. In the next take, the player
produced a very regimented ornament that satisfied the producer. Discussing it later,
the instrumentalist was still annoyed, believing that the take was much less musical
than the two preceding it'' (Smith, field notes).
There is music in this recording session, just as there is music in the rehearsal. But
both settings are about how to work with snatches of sound ö something less than the
resulting CD and certainly something less than the concentrated performance
event. Understandings of musical `perfection' vary between different musical
genres ö contrast, for example, the above discussion on recording music to those
described in Keil and Feld (1994) and Monson (1996). Nevertheless it is possible to
extract a sense from these snatches of how music works more generally ö for example,
to structure power relations among musicians, between different groups of profes-
sionals, and between men and women performers (see Bayton, 1990; Middleton,
1990). On the other hand, as Small argues, `à musical performance is an encounter
between human beings that takes place through the medium of sounds organised in
specific ways'' (1998, page 10). This encounter has qualities that neither rehearsals
nor recording sessions disclose. We turn to them next.
Performing place
Small's (1998) account of musicking recognises its participatory nature. Anderson et al
(2005) emphasise its lived practicality: music is the practice of living. So musicking is
about listening as well as about sounding, and performers and audiences do both.
Recently, Back has argued that cultural geographers should engage more sensitively
with the practice of `deep listening', which, for him, involves both ``taking musical
and sound form seriously'' and participating `ìn the spaces where music is made,
felt and enjoyed'' (2003, page 274). However, whereas Back's methodological interest
focuses on the ``search for ways to represent and transpose sound and music'' (page 274,
emphasis added), ours is an attempt also to engage with the nonrepresentational qualities
of musical performance (see Langer, 1942; Morton, 2005; Smith, 2001; Wood, 2004).
First, though, there is the buildup to a performance event. To the extent that
music is about making, and listening to, sounds in context, it is important to under-
stand what it is that marks some contexts off ö for all time or just for a moment ö as
musical places. It is the salience of these markings that prompts Said (1991) to talk
about concerts in concert halls as èxtreme occasions'. Life inside, at that time, takes
on distinctive qualities (which we consider later). Marking out the place physically
and crossing its threshold is part of this, but other tactics can be excavated. Our field
notes are replete with these. Musicians change their clothes, for example: audiences
converge.
Wood: `` It's a sort of transitional space. They still bring in the everyday, in that
you can hear people chattering about parking the car and how much the drinks
cost at the bar, but whilst they're doing that ... .''
Duffy: ``... maybe they're preparing themselves to being receptive ... the focus shifts
from being between people to being between the people and the performers .''
Smith: `` Perhaps it's a shift out of language. Perhaps you don't actually stop the
process of communication ...'' (authors' discussion).
This shift is a remarkable and quite unruly thing: a taken-for-granted aspect of musical
performance that bears interrogation. Consider how hard it is to establish and how
easy it is to slip out of:
`Àt the interval, the appreciative audience made a beeline for the bars. I wandered
around [eavesdropping] and feeling not at all out of place, since lots of other people
were also wandering about aimlessly ... .What I heard was:
Snippets relating to business deals.
Restaurant stories (amusing or irritating pre-concert dining).
Can we see anyone we know?
Knowledgable comments about the music or the group (these very much a minority):
Òf course Monteverdi always did this ...
how they wrote music in those days ... .
The singers all come from Oxbridge ...'
Two singers walked through the bar; no one noticed ... .
`The performance will recommence in 3 minutes' (no reaction in the bar area).
Eventually people trickled back, continuing to chat, and sitting not perhaps as expec-
tantly as one might expect (7 instrumentalists had taken up their positions before
anyone plucked up the courage to clap)'' (Smith, field notes).
The shift out of language that marks the start of musicking is, in our notes, characterised
by an aural pause, the sonic equivalent of a still point which opens a door into different
ways of expressing and experiencing human relations. This pause may be signalled by what
seems like silenceöa powerful state whose manipulation is discussed by Attali (1985)
(for its repressive qualities) and by Johnson (1995) (for its political significance). But in our
research it is best conceptualised as a moment filled with anticipation for the potential of
human life.
Duffy: ``What does attending this concert mean to you? ''
Int 1: ``For me performance means a special, a prepared piece, a masterpiece, and that
means that the performers planned and prepared the program to give a grand perfor-
mance! [Laughs] It will encourage younger people to indulge their talents and for old
peopleöthey enjoy the sounds. If the performance is something special, something you
haven't experienced before, well it's a great experience, you know? ''
Int 2: `Ìt is obviously about the closeness of the performer to the instrument and the, oh
the music! ... you're sitting here in a small hall with an audience, and very close to the
performer and then you suddenly get these ideas which you wouldn't normally, wouldn't
normally have if you listened to the same piece played on a CD'' (Duffy, field notes).
The `most perfect silence', which Attali (1985) describes as driving a rift between
musicians and audienceöcreating `à monologue of specialists competing in front of
consumers'' (page 47)öis neither silent nor perfect when approached empirically. It
simply signals a resort to other kinds of social relations and experiences örelationships
whose qualities we have considered using a combination of soundbites, eavesdropping,
`participant sensing', and audio-videoing.
Consider these fieldnotes:
``Four women dressed in black are on stage. Two harpists (who stand playing `small'
harps mounted on stands), a guitarist and a piano accordionist. ... Second piece is a set
of two reels [a and b]. First reel introduced as a `traditional' `Scottish' tune that's been
`made into a rock `n' roll number'. Guitar starts strumming a punchy, strong, steady
beat. Strumming plays with the quaver rhythm of a quad. time beat alternating
between two or three notesösounds quite rocky. Harp comes in playing a reel.
Audience whoops to greet melody (reminds me of a ceilidh). Music feels really laid
back. Guitar quietly accompanies the harpöthe performers glance at each other and
smile. Audience moves gently in time with the music. Guy next to me lightly taps the
beat on his knee. It's a really intense atmosphere. Everyone's listening with rapt
attention. Harpist repeats the melody but is joined by the second harpöplays a really
funky `walking' bass line. Occasionally [second harp] plays some really loud punchy,
syncopated notes. Sounds very mellow, quite jazzy, but everyone's oddly restrained.
Perhaps that's the [formal] venue? Sudden change of pace and mood. Piano accordion
flies in with a fast and furious reel ...'' (Wood, field notes).
This kind of participant sensing relies on the researcher experiencing music in the
time ^ spaces in which it is performed and note-taking simultaneously. The aim of
the exercise is not to write some kind of definitive commentary on the performance.
Indeed, as Haraway (1988) warns us, attempting to perform this kind of `god trick'
of ìnfinite vision' is a futile and disingenuous activity (see also Rose, 1997). In contrast,
the aim of our participant sensing is to acknowledge (and use) our position(s) as
sensing, participant researchers in order to gain a partial insight into what is `becoming'
in musical performances. Sometimes, however, this partiality is manifest in unexpected
ways, which simultaneously testify to the character of musical relations and to the
limitations of method. On the one hand:
Smith: `` I kept getting to the stage where I'd forgotten why I was there ... I wasn't doing
it [the research] in the same systematic way because I was just experimenting ... [and]
because I like the music so much, I would be so absorbed in it that suddenly 20
minutes had gone by and I hadn't done anything about it ... I was `being' it, so I wasn't
therefore inclined or interested in doing anything else'' (authors' discussion).
On the other hand:
Wood: `` the notes that I've taken when being in a performance have all generally
tended to be very kind of materialistic or object based in some ways like I've
described musical styles, I've described who is there and what they're doing.
I've put in some emotive things, but because I myself have been withdrawn from
that emotive process ö because I'm busy writing away ö I haven't been able to tap
into those things'' (authors' discussion).
This `janus-faced' experience is not necessarily problematic; but it does require
attention:
Duffy: `` You can never actually be in one mode of data collection or one mode of
being at a concert. All these other things are going on and you need to be aware
of what you're doing at a particular time, even if it's very difficult if you get carried
away with the music. But that is another mode of being ö you can't discount it
because it's not easy to get at what's happening, but it's really important. It's
knowing how to capture that ... we have to switch modes to express what is
happening'' (authors' discussion).
Equally, there is an imperative to secure other partial accounts from (other) audience
members. We have approached this by adapting our own participatory tactic into short,
òn-the-spot' interviews conducted during or immediately after the performance. One
common finding is that the experience is unspeakable, though the unspeakable itself
contains cues about the relational qualities of musicking.
R: ``That was amazing. Fucking brilliant ... fucking brilliant.''
Wood: ``What was it in particular that you liked about it? ''
R: ``Just everything, just brilliant, pure brilliance. Stunning atmosphere. It was
amazing.''
Wood: ``How would you describe it to somebody who couldn't be at it?''
R: ``They're missing out definitely. Totally. Oh that was brilliant.''
Wood: ``How did you feel when you were in there? ''
R: `Òh ... just, just brilliant!'' (òn-the-spot' interview, male, early twenties, Wood,
field notes).
Short, on-the-spot interviews capture the `raw' emotions that people experienced
during the performance. These experiences may lack eloquence and clarity, but they
do evoke some of the joy and exhilaration, as well as, at times, the pathos and
despair, experienced at the event. More reflective accounts from follow-up in-depth
interviews tend to be more articulate but say less about the affective qualities of
encounter, which we will argue is perhaps the key methodological challenge for
research on musicking.
R: ``... [Act C] was probably the best.''
Wood: ``What do you think it is about [Act C's] performance that kind of ... ? ''
R: `Èrm, well she'd a lovely voice. I mean I like folk songs anyway, and she sings
mainly traditional folk songs and ... what I felt was really good about, I mean, she's
such a fun person apart from her songs. [...] Well you know what she's like she's sort of
small and sparky and really quite funny and then she sings all these sort of sad songs
and I think it was just the contrast between her banter and er the songs themselves.
It was just fantastic. I really enjoyed that '' (in-depth interview, male, early forties,
Wood, field notes).
These after-the-event discussions give a more measured and reflexive account of the
performance. These narratives lack the exuberance of the on-the-spot interviews,
though they do fill in some important descriptive details around the kinds of sounds
that were heard and the style of performance.
Wood: `` Thinking back to my interviews ... people talk about music in very different
ways ...they either talk about it as a cultural product like Ì was very impressed
with it because they did this, that and the other' or people talk about it as a
memory of a doing, a memory of an experience: òh I wish I could recapture
that ...' ... my kind of short interviews at the performance have allowed me to get
into the emotive stuff because [at this point ö immediately after a performance
event] people generally don't talk about music, they talk about experience''
Participant sensing and on-the-spot interviews have been extended by Duffy, who is
using methods of photograph elicitation (Clark-Ibänez, 2004; Harper, 2002) to develop
a method of audio elicitation. Participants are asked to maintain an audio diary of
their time at a festival, as a record of the `now'. This provides information on how
individuals structure their participation in, and express their sense of belonging to,
particular groups within the time ^ space of the festival. It will also be a significant
source of specific discussion with subjects about their experience of music in the
festival space. This dialogic process extends the methodologies used by Monson
(1996) and Juslin and Sloboda (2001), while addressing some theoretical concerns
with signification and gesture proposed by Cumming (2000).
DeNora and Belcher's (2000) experiments with audio recording experiences of
music in retail outlets prompted us to explore the potential of using these methods
to capture more of the performance itself. These approaches are appealing from a
research perspective because they assist with multitasking whilst also `buying' time
and space for reflection:
Duffy: `` Video recording helps. You can switch off and just record, and perhaps
take notes of other things that are happening. The problem with that is that you
are choosing what you are going to look at. So even though I will look at the
audience and move the camera around I can't see everything all the time. So in a
way your viewpoint is limited by looking through that lens. It's good when I've
had to go back and describe the performances ö it's all there for me to sit down
and take my time with it rather than trying to write lots of notes. And perhaps
things will come up when I review it that I might have missed while I was sitting
there.''
On the other hand:
Duffy: `Àt one festival I attended, the organisers let me sit up in the sound booth
and so I was above looking down, while when I have undertaken ethnographic
work at other festivals I was wandering around amongst the crowd. So people
alongside me in the booth were quite aware that I was there in an observer's role,
and so they perhaps might not do what they'd normally do. And I was at a
distance from the audience and their responses, which was of benefit in one
way ö you don't want to be disrupting the audience ö but it also meant I was
removed from their emotional and other responses to the performances''
Creating an audiovisual record of the performance is, of course, a subjective activity.
The selection and composition of images reflects a range of interests, aims, and
motivations that lie behind the process of filming (see Rose, 2001). An audiovisual
document of a performance will therefore be partial and reflect those aspects of
the event that seemed interesting or relevant at the time. Nevertheless, having an
audiovisual record of the performance (no matter how partial that record may be)
provides the researcher with the opportunity to control his or her experience (and his or
her analysis) of the performance. Unlike live performances, the researcher can pause,
rewind, slow down, and repeatedly experience the doings of a recorded performance.
Audiovisual recordings have also been used as the basis of focus groups and inter-
views designed to elicit more about the listening experience (see Monson, 1996). For
example, the relationship between sound and the visual experience of performance
might be explored through playing performances to audiences with and without visual
cues. Recordings equally offer a route to discussing and exploring the (emotional)
experience of musical performances. Watching a recording of a previously attended
live performance, for example, can help research participants to describe their feelings
of the live event perhaps using their (generally less intense) experience of the recording
as a comparator. As Phelan argues, creating any kind of document of a performance
acts as `à spur to memory, an encouragement of memory to become present'' (1993,
page 146). Additionally, sharingöin a focus groupöthe experience of watching and
hearing audiences and performers interact with each other in a recording can help
participants to describe their emotional experience of the event; the recording provides
`tangible' examples of phenomena that participants find difficult to articulate. This can
be taken further through the use of audio recordings of performance spaces which are
specifically designed to attend not only to actual musical performance but also to the
ambient sounds that are often filtered out by listening conventions: the coughs, small
talk, scraping of chairs, the rustling of paper, and so on.
Although recordings of musical events can never recreate the moment of
performance, they can play a useful role in a multimethod research design. Like
participant-sensing notes they can be used as an aide-mëmoire for participants and
researchers and provide another point of access into the time ^ spaces of musical
performance. However, audiovisual recordings may also be useful for presenting
research materials and findings. In recent years there has been increasing interest in
the ways in which academic researchers present their work (see Bennett and Shurmer-
Smith, 2001; 2002; Bingham, 2003; Duffy and Instone, 2004). In part, this interest has
arisen in response to an acknowledgment that writing up research and (re)presenting
the ideas, beliefs, and views of those who have participated in research is not an easy
or straightforward process (either technically or ethically). Whereas some authors have
experimented with different styles of writing in order to find a presentation style that
is appropriate for their methodology (see, for example, Bennett, 2000; Jones, 1998;
Latham, 2003) others have either looked to supplementing their written texts with
CDs or DVDs or have chosen nonwritten media through which to present their ideas
(see Lee, 1996; Morton, 2005; Wood, 2004).
Although all these approaches and engagementsölistening, on-the-spot interviews,
video recording, and so onömight be a means to many ends, we are using them
to engage with a diverse range of philosophies and theories, now referred to as

nonrepresentational thinking, which prioritise practice and experience (see Dewey,
1929; Rorty, 1999; Taylor, 1995, Thrift, 1996; see also Nash, 2000). The challenge in
developing musical methodologies is to engage with the creative, nonrepresentational
qualities of musical performance; to try to recognise and think the unknown; to engage
with a continually becoming world (see Grosz, 1999b; Phelan, 1993; Ruud, 2004;
Thrift, 1996; Williams, 1977). In particular, we aim to be sensitive to the extent to
which (musical) performances are, from a conventional perspective, filled with gaps
or ruptures which are, potentially, the location for new (creative) ways of understand-
ing, knowing, and being (see Deleuze, 1988; 1990; Dewsbury, 2000). For example,
Wood's (2004) work explores the ways in which ideas of `Scottishness' are played
with in musical performances. The participant-sensing notes on page .... provide one
example of how musical performances do not simply reproduce ideas of `Scottishness'
but, rather provided moments where `new' understandings of `Scottishness' could be
expressed, experienced, and negotiated. A rock 'n' roll beat, `funky' bassline, and jazz
syncopations develop a `traditional' Scottish reel in new and unforeseen ways; they
create a way of being `Scottish' that was previously unthought or unknown; they raise
questions about what `Scottishness' is (how it becomes) and how it is recognised and
understood.
Despite some obvious problems the combination of methods we have used can
provide a useful (albeit partially documented and subjectively situated) record of the
performing place that musicking constitutes. By focusing on the nonrepresentational
aspects of performance these methods can be used to study the ways in which
performances are framed, made sense of, and understood by audience members
and performers. Most importantly, they draw attention to what can be recovered
from spaces filled by ö constituted through ö human relationships which are beyond
words; which privilege affect; which work through sound and silence as well as light
and dark; and which contain the possibility for detecting, for enacting, a different kind
of world. To explore the soundworld, we turn to performance not because it is method-
ologically appealing, appropriate, or practical, but because it contains something of
radical importance.
Smith: `` Whether it's practical to `be' it ... whether that's actually practical in an
academic study or not is something that I think is quite interesting. But I suppose
why I think there's something in it is that ... at that moment when people are doing
[musicking] they're not thinking about a category that they're in; they do have at that
moment the potential to be between categories or making something new or
changing the old conventions ... every moment that goes by something new is
straining to get out ... . But how do you get at that ...?'' (authors' discussion).
Part of all our work is about exploring the possibilities of becoming sensing
participantsönot of objectifying a performance, but of being it. It is about trying to
capture and understand the moment of musical performance: the sounds and social
relations that constitute these kinds of events. It is concerned with tracing familiar
ways of being, knowing, and doing and listening for the unknown, the previously
unarticulated, the making of the future. The last part of our discussion is devoted
to this: to the character, quality, content, meaning, and affect of the social relations
of sound.
Unspeakable geographies
Smith: `` Maybe I'm just romantically inclined as to what music can achieve ö but
I do like this idea of the possibility for something new and something different;
something that we don't normally have appearing, or giving a glimpse of itself ... [what
our research suggests is that]through musical performance there is some dimension
of human experience that it's possible to tap into more effectively than through
some of the more traditional media that we use in social science'' (authors'
discussion).
In this paper we document a wide range of approaches for listening to, thinking
about, and participating in music. Although we recognise the relevance of musical
materials, the economic significance of the music industry, the richness of rehearsal,
and so on, our own priorities have been to attend to the concert event, the live
performance, the time ^ space of musicking, through which the intimate, emotional
quality of human relations is laid bare (see Wood and Smith, 2004). Consider this
example:
R: ``... there's something about music that can really sort of touch you emotionally and
you see it in other people as well and you feel like you're connecting.''
Wood: ``Right. How do you see it in other people?''
R: `Ìn the way that they move and their faces light up and everyone's like `Yeah! This
is good and happy and ...' you know, and yeah, you genuinely feel that people are
letting down a shell and somehow, sort of breaking out and just enjoying themselves,
yeah . ... All the defences are knocked down a bit and erm ... yeah, I think it's ... I think
music can do that. When you see that you connect with someone else, you're both
appreciating the same thing. You know, that's lovely'' (in-depth interview, female,
late twenties, Wood, field notes).
Consider too this experience:
``When the music was played a web of intimacy ... allowed them to express and experi-
ence themselves in what seemed to be much deeper, and more powerful ways than
before. Passages, which earlier had been hastily run through, were now played with an
empathy and tenderness that had me spellbound. It was an emotionally intensive
experience'' (Wood, field notes).
And reflect on this characterisation of performing:
`Ìt's about the relationship between me and whatever, whoever's performing at the same
time. There's a chemistry ... between me and the audience and it's always one of those
things where I give, I give an awful lot to the audience, but I get a lot back and so it's
a two way thing. And it's about the experience ... . It's about the interaction, it's the
atmosphere that happens'' (in-depth interview, female musician, Wood, field notes).
Musical performances are, then, about ìntimate' encounters with others; they are
about sharing an emotional experience with other people, most of whom will never see
each other again, let alone exchange the time of day. These are encounters where
feeling, sensing, and tacit understanding are more prevalent than articulation and
explanation (see Gertler, 2003; Polanyi, 1967). The sounds and rhythms of music
constitute a nonverbal signifying system; they express precisely what we cannot express
in language (Langer, 1942), so that musicöand our responses to itöis an expression of
emotions and drives that have the potential to recreate our social and spatial selves (see
Kristeva, 1997). These qualities are what make music about being and becoming, and to
get to grips with this is to understand the way identities are made, to engage with the
potential by which futures are shaped. This is more than an academic point. As
Saldanha (2005) argues in his account of the racial dynamics of life in Goa, which
are bound up in the micropolitics of music, `Ì suggest that it is precisely its rather
mysterious effect on the body that makes music political'' (page 707).
Methodologically, this is challenging, not least because, in common with other
areas of academic enquiry, studies of music have `traditionally' neglected emotional
relations and underestimated emotional power (Juslin and Sloboda, 2001). Indeed,
although many scholars of music acknowledge its emotional content, few of them
adequately account for how and why music works powerfully to shape an emotional
geography of relatedness (Wood, 2002). One result of this ùnderplaying' of emotion
has been a tendency to produce academic works that are distant and remote from the
emotional experience of musical performance and so contain few methodological cues
(see also McClary and Walser, 1990). Often there is no attempt at all to engage with the
`moment' of performance in all its emotional intensity. Instead, musical performances
(conceptualised as past events) are simply `dissected' into their various textual, histor-
ical, and musical parts and presented before the readeröa practice which, as McClary
(1985) noted two decades ago, paralyses and destroys the vivaciousness of music.
Even where emotions are discussed in musicology, they tend to be expressed as
rarefied forms relating to `higher' abstract and aesthetic properties of music rather
than to more ìmmediate', `raw', èveryday' articulations of emotional experience (see,
for example, Budd, 1995; Davies, 1994; Kivy, 1989; Langer, 1942; Matravers, 1998).
Although this approach illustrates the conceptual diversity and development of theo-
ries of music and emotion, as a body of literature it tends to centre on rather àbstract'
discussions of emotion that are presented by `musical experts'. As a consequence there
are few academic discourses available in which to frame and discuss what Juslin and
Sloboda (2001) refer to as relevant understandings of emotion: èveryday' emotional
articulations of performances presented by òrdinary' audiences. Such discourses, they
argue, have been ``relegated to the `discourse of the hallway' (e.g., Frith 1996), those
informal, òff-duty' moments when academics allow themselves to say what they feel
about the music they study'' (page 5).(5)
The difficulty of working with and writing about emotions is well documented
within the social sciences. For example, Lupton states that: ``The very mutability,
ephemerality and intangible nature of `the emotions', as well as their inextricable
interlinking with and emergence from constantly changing social, cultural and histor-
ical contexts, means that they are not amenable to precise categorization'' (1998,
page 5). It is not really surprising that, in our own research, we have found it difficult
to meet the challenge of engaging with the emotional relations of music, though we
have gone some way to setting out more systematically what that challenge consists of:
Smith: `` rather than appearing `superior' to the sound engineer, we're doing the
same thing.''
Wood: `` people's spontaneous reaction to the music is quite different to the
framework that I'm working with; but when I ask them about their experience,
or their memory, the experience actually changes and fits in ...''
Duffy: `` when we ask questions it helps solidify it ...''
Smith: `` we're actually asking them to verbalise something that they might not
otherwise have done. So, in a sense, we're making a particular set of meanings by
forcing people to `talk them' whereas before they might have been experiencing
them in an unarticulated way'' (authors' discussion).
(5) For example, Sharpe (1982) argues that only those with a basic grasp of musical appreciation
would talk about emotions and music. `Proper' musical scholarship transcends such concerns.
Anderson (2004b) has filled some important gaps by considering the way recorded
music is implicated in the circulation and organisation of affect, and we too seek a
more holistic exploration of musical performances, incorporating what Juslin and
Sloboda (2001) refer to as the òff-duty' moments of musical experience into our
academic enquiries. What is required is a framework that is useful and appropriate
for the study of music as a creative practice, where meanings and understandings
emerge through tacitly known and emotionally experienced processes of becoming.
At the time of writing this kind of consideration of the epistemological properties
of music is considered only in a handful of works (see, for example, Anderson, 2005;
DeNora, 2000; DeNora and Belcher, 2000; Duffy, 2000; 2005; Jones, 1998; Morton,
2005; Saldanha, 2005; Wood, 2004).
But there is another tactic. Historically, music has been valued as a medium of
emotional communication precisely because it allows for the expression of feelings that
cannot, perhaps should not, be put into words (see Langer, 1942). Music has been
about the unspoken and unspeakable: the emotionally precious, the personal, the
hidden, the repressed. For this reason, one way of appreciating the emotive power
and radical potential of music is to engage with music as therapyöa therapeutic
practice designed precisely to invite participants to communicate emotionally (see
Ansdell, 2002; Bunt and Pavlicevic, 2001; Lee, 1996). In particular, the newly emerging
practice of `community music therapy' (Pavlicevic and Ansdell, 2004), where music is
used to ``bridge the gap between individuals and communities ... creating a space for
common musicking and sharing of artistic and human values'' (Ruud, 2004, page 12,
italics in original), might provide a valuable insight into what musicking is, how it
`works' in the world, and how we can access its affects. Although framed within a
discourse of health and understood explicitly as a therapeutic practice, musicking
within community music therapy has many parallels with the musicking described in
this paper; musicking is an emotional process that builds identities, creates spaces of
community and belonging, and has the potential to challenge paradigms and empower
agency. Just as music exceeds the bounded spaces of concert halls, churches, social
clubs, and muddy fields, just as sound mixes old identities into new socialities, so
emotions overflow into scholarship and methods spill into practice. The challenge,
then, is to think about how our practice as geographers might work with and through
practices of musicking: to develop ways of expressing the ùnspeakable geographies'
of music.
Acknowledgements. We are grateful to the many musicians, performers, and audience members
who, one way or another, have informed this work. We would also like to thank two anonymous
referees for their constructive comments.
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ß 2007 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain

The Art of Doing (Geographies Of) Music

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Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2007, volume 25, pages 867 ^ 889

The art of doing (geographies of ) music

From: 5 med@unimelb 4 5n.x.wood@leeds 4 5 susanj.smith@durham 4

Speaking of venues ...

An obvious place in which to take soundings is in rehearsals. Rehearsals assemble

Soundings, however, do not amount to music.

to engage with a diverse range of philosophies and theories, now referred to as

Smith S J, 2001, ``Doing qualitative research: from interpretation to action'' in Qualitative

ß 2007 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain

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