THE RELATIONSHIP OF POVERTY TO MUSIC

Author(s): Klisala Harrison

Source: Yearbook for Traditional Music , Vol. 45 (2013), pp. 1-12
Published by: International Council for Traditional Music
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5921/yeartradmusi.45.2013.0001

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 the relationship of Poverty to music

by Klisala Harrison

Flows of money and resources receive increasing treatment in music; however,

lack of money and resources is rarely discussed comprehensively. This special
half-issue of the Yearbook for Traditional Music titled “Music and Poverty” aims
towards formulating a nuanced understanding of music and poverty relationships.
This collection of articles considers what the complex theoretical issue of pov-
erty can add to understandings of music and musical cultures, and vice versa. To
this end, “Music and Poverty” builds on music-research publications that mention
poverty and a growing number of scholarly studies of music that provide valuable
information about music-of-poverty contexts. Although poverty has long formed
a comprehensive focus of cognate disciplines of ethnomusicology, especially
anthropology and sociology, and of studies in policy, economics, human rights,
and health, most of ethnomusicology has yet to consider poverty explicitly or in
detail, to open up multiple issues involved in it, and to draw on an extensive pov-
erty literature relevant to culture.

Definitions of poverty

Poverty has a richness of meaning and vocabulary, with a long history. Dictionary
definitions open it up as both a material and an interpretive concept. Poverty, on
the one hand, means the human condition of being poor or not having enough
money or goods, or otherwise experiencing deprivation (in other words, human
“indigence, destitution, want”).1 Poverty also means, more generally, “deficiency,
lack, scantiness, dearth, scarcity [or] smallness of amount.” On the other hand,
poverty can refer to a scantiness or insufficiency specifically in desired quality, or
in “property, quality … or ingredient.”
In the context of colonial and imperial expansion, a life of poverty was and is
a reality for many. Philosopher Thomas Pogge suggests that without the horrors
of European conquest, poverty may well not exist to the same degree that it does
currently. The annual death toll from poverty-related causes is around eighteen
million (Pogge 2005). After the first signs that a capitalist economy could amelio-
rate poverty, early nineteenth-century debates asked whether poverty had moral or
rational causes (Araújo and Cambria, this issue). Persistent questions in poverty
scholarship since have been: Who defines who is poor? (The identification of the
poor is always in the eye of the beholder with the exception of poverty that threat-
ens basic survival.) Who is responsible for who is poor? What is “poverty”? And
most frequently: How can poverty be diminished?

1.  Definitions are from the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1971), s.v.
“poverty.”
Yearbook for Traditional Music 45 (2013)

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2 2013 yearbook for traditional music

In the twentieth century, ideas about poverty can be traced back to Charles
Booth’s (1892) pauperism and B. Seebohm Rowntree’s (1901) definition of pov-
erty as resultant from insufficient “total earnings … to obtain the minimum neces-
saries for the maintenance of merely physical efficiency” (Rowntree 1901:117).
Rowntree paid particular attention to human health. By 1965, Peter Townsend and
Brian Abel-Smith proposed that poverty is a “relative concept” (1965:63). In the
late 1950s and early 1960s, poverty began to be understood by the public, and by
politicians and academics, as important to economic development in part thanks to
the popular books The Affluent Society (Galbraith 1958) and The Other America
(Harrington 1962). Ideas of the poverty line and levels of disposable income domi-
nated discourse.
In the 1970s, political debates at the World Bank and at universities further
reshaped the idea of poverty by giving attention to relative deprivation. Townsend,
the main proponent of relative deprivation, wrote that it occurs when “individuals,
families and groups … lack the resources to obtain the types of diets, participate
in the activities and have the living conditions … which are customary, or at least
widely encouraged and approved, in the societies to which they belong” (Townsend
1979:31). Another important development was the broadening of the notion of
income poverty to include a wider set of “basic needs.” The International Labour
Organization’s pioneering work in the mid-1970s defined poverty, in addition to
resulting from a lack of income, as involving lack of access to health, education,
and basic social services thought to be essential for survival. In the 1980s, under-
standings of poverty gave increased attention to issues of participation and to non-
monetary aspects of poor populations such as vulnerability, security, and capabili-
ties (Sen 1985, 1987). Studies of gender and poverty gained greater prominence.
Since the 1990s, poverty has developed further into a concept that encompasses
social entitlements, which are widely understood as rights or are supported by leg-
islation, like well-being levels and human rights. The United Nations Development
Programme (UNDP) also conceptualized poverty within human development:
“ ‘poverty is the denial of opportunities and choices’ and the objective of human
development is ‘to lead a long, healthy, [and] creative life and to enjoy a decent
standard of living, freedom, dignity, self-esteem and the respect for others’ ” (UNDP
Human Development Report 1997, as quoted in Mabughi and Selim 2006:181–83).
In research contexts of developing countries, poverty is a key issue in the survival
of people and of their cultures. Given that the World Bank, International Labour
Organization, and United Nations Development Programme have published widely
on issues of poverty, it is clear that poverty is an area that is very sensitive to poli-
tics. This sets a challenge to ethnomusicologists to be aware and explicit about the
politics of their stances towards poverty.

Music and poverty relationships in ethnomusicology

Conditions of material poverty have long informed contexts in which ethnogra-

phers of musical culture conduct fieldwork. In the twentieth century, certain “clas-

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harrison the relationship of poverty to music 3

sic” fields of ethnographical study—for instance, Native American music, African

American music, and Roma music in Europe—were located in contexts of coloni-
alism, civil-rights deficits, and industrialization that resulted in ethnic poverty. A
trend of mentioning poverty in academic music publications emerged only in the
1970s, and became much more intense starting about 1995. However, these studies
have not dealt with the complexity and multidimensionality of the term poverty in
relation to music.
What music research can give to understandings of poverty include the possibil-
ity that, through studying music—a multidimensional social expression involving
at once sound, performance, sociality, culture, and economics—it becomes pos-
sible to study different configurations-in-action of a multiplicity of concepts and
issues that are engaged in “poverty.” Such study can include symbolic aspects of
music and of musicking (Small 1998), as well as the relationships of music and
performance to theories of poverty. Furthermore, music research can contribute
deeper understandings of the relationships between musical culture and poverty in
its multiple dimensions, and of the ways in which poverty is defined within sys-
tems of culture. Research questions to consider when investigating relationships
between musical culture and poverty may include the following: Which notions
of poverty are deemed important enough, or not, and by whom, to make music
about, and to perform through expressions that include music, like dance, theatre,
and multimedia? Which notions of poverty are considered important enough to
organize musical events and activities around, or not? When and where do musical
happenings that address poverty happen and not happen? Scholarship on music and
poverty can also be used to question whether and under what circumstances actions
of music may be used to ameliorate poverty, and when musical actions are part of
events that attribute lack. It can be used to question what are the power dynamics
of attributing “poverty,” and what such lack means to musical traditions. Such
scholarship may also ask how sonic systems are sensitive to poverty, and when or
if musicking is or can be resistant to poverty.
“Music and Poverty” presents new work by ethnomusicologists on the relation-
ships between music and poverty, which is highly relevant to current ethnomu-
sicological scholarship. Poverty informs the lives of research subjects studied in
several newly emergent research themes in ethnomusicology, including music’s
connection to forced migration, violence in socio-economically depressed urban
areas, and disease (Rice 2013). As ethnomusicology becomes a field that is more
and more issue-oriented, addressing problems involved in music and the appli-
cation of ethnomusicology abroad and increasingly at home (Stock 2008:202–4),
poverty also becomes a pressing concern to be pursued.

Poverty as social deprivation

The understanding of poverty elaborated most in the “Music and Poverty” articles
is that poverty involves different types of social deprivation (see figure 1). In this

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4 2013 yearbook for traditional music

Absolute poverty absolute subsistence

Primary poverty income too low to provide basic necessities
Secondary income at the margin (will be considered poor if budgeted unwisely)
poverty
Income-based disposable income as the benchmark (e.g., UNDP’s USD 2 per day as
poverty the poverty line)
Consumption- food consumption as indicator of poverty (current international
based poverty standard is 2,200 calories per day)
Vulnerability vulnerability to poverty due to abnormal life circumstances (e.g.,
seasonal stress, or shocks such as war, drought, or illness)
Relative poverty exclusion from a standard of living that is widely considered in society
to be reasonable and acceptable
Relative evaluated in comparison with a reference group in society (poverty
deprivation includes deprivation in terms of what poor people do not have as well
as what they perceive they should have)
Social exclusion exclusion from participation in “mainstream” economical, political,
and cultural life; indicators of social exclusion are unemployment,
low income, poor housing, poor health, high crime, and low
education level
Livelihood how sustainable in terms of avoiding poverty is a person’s livelihood
sustainability
Basic needs poverty is defined as physiological deprivation of the requirements
for meeting basic human needs (e.g., food, shelter, schooling, health
services, potable water and sanitation, employment opportunities, and
opportunities for community participation)
Well-being poverty’s relationship to human well-being, which refers to health and
mortality, or to a lack of “poverty” circumstances
Entitlements entitlements are widely understood as rights, or are supported by
legislation (e.g., human rights including cultural rights, or health and
well-being)
Human the removal of obstacles to what a person can do in life, thereby
development expanding a person’s choices (removal of social deprivations of
poverty)
Cultural poverty deprivation of the means to express culture, which has strong and
dynamic interrelationships with absolute poverty, primary poverty,
secondary poverty, income-based poverty, consumption-based
poverty, and relative poverty
Musical poverty musical poverty may be understood as a subcategory of cultural
poverty, i.e., a lack of means to express music in culture. It also may
refer to a lack of (a particular kind of) music or musical expression.

Figure 1. Types of social deprivation involved in poverty (elaborated from

Mabughi and Selim 2006).

view, poverty may be income-based, consumption-based,2 or entitlement-based,

meaning that in one of these three ways, an individual is deprived from having a

2.  Definitions of consumption-based poverty, referring to a minimum acceptable food

intake, leave room for understanding poverty in non-capitalist and “traditional” societies.

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harrison the relationship of poverty to music 5

decent quality of life (Mabughi and Selim 2006:181). Poverty as social deprivation
may also be defined in a more nuanced way. Figure 1 lists and defines sixteen quali-
tative dimensions for the measurement of poverty as social deprivation in relation
to music.
Poverty-related concepts in figure 1 that this journal issue does not take up in
detail are consumption-based poverty and vulnerability to poverty. “Music and
Poverty” seeks to contribute variously to research on music and poverty in relation
to absolute poverty, primary poverty, secondary poverty, income-based poverty,
relative poverty, relative deprivation, social exclusion, livelihood sustainability,
basic needs, well-being, human development, cultural poverty, musical poverty,
and some types of entitlements (like cultural rights, but not human rights in gen-
eral). The relationship of the articles featured in this journal to these fourteen types
of social deprivation, indicated below in bold, will now be considered.
Conditions of absolute and primary poverty form the context of the musical
studies presented in this issue by Samuel Araújo and Vincenzo Cambria, Rebecca
Dirksen, Pirkko Moisala, and myself. Absolute poverty, sometimes also called
subsistence poverty, refers to subsistence below a minimum socially acceptable
living condition. Based on nutrition and other essential requirements, Rowntree
(1901) defined an absolute standard of poverty for families. He also distinguished
between primary and secondary poverty, primary poverty referring to families
whose income was too low to provide basic necessities, and secondary poverty
referring to families who were minimally above the “poverty line” but who would
experience primary poverty with any additional financial strain. Jeff Todd Titon’s
article evokes secondary poverty.
Most of the authors of this special half-issue also interpret poverty in terms of
relative poverty, in which the poor are excluded from a standard of living that is
widely considered in society to be reasonable and acceptable. Relative poverty
now dominates discussions about developing countries. It has largely replaced the
older idea of absolute poverty in developed and developing countries. Social exclu-
sion and relative deprivation may be understood as experiences of relative poverty.
Moisala examines social exclusion in her article on Nepalese music, cultural
rights, and sociopolitical changes in Nepal. Social exclusion describes

when individuals, groups, or communities experience a combination of linked prob-

lems, such as unemployment, low incomes, poor housing, poor health, high crime
and low educational standard. [It] is a broader concept than poverty, encompass-
ing not only material means but … inability to participate effectively in economic,
political and cultural life, and, in some characterizations, alienation and distance
from mainstream security. (Mabughi and Selim 2006:187)

Over fifty years ago, Nepal officially abandoned the Hindu caste system, which
had put the lowest “untouchable” castes in economically and culturally marginal-
ized positions. Hinduization continues to impact everyday life for communities
and individuals, though, including musicians of the “untouchable” Hindu caste
Gandharva, previously known as Gāine. Moisala undertakes an analysis of these
sociopolitical changes illuminated by the life of a Gāine musician, Khim Bahadur

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6 2013 yearbook for traditional music

Gayak, who experienced an exceptional status transformation from being a beggar-

musician and sāraṅgi performer—the caste occupation of Gāines historically—to
being a nationally recognized tradition bearer. She concludes that “music-making
may provide an opportunity to go beyond predetermined social deprivation, while
wider political and structural changes in a social system are needed to make longer-
lasting and more far-reaching changes for a whole social group.”
By contrast, many national and local policies and initiatives from South America
to North America to Europe work to address or overcome the poverty struggle
against social exclusion, often through policies and practices of social inclusion
including through music. Media documentation of such efforts and their “success
stories,” documented by journalists and other supportive reporters (e.g., Tunstall
2012), take up the most space of publications on this sort of musical intervention.
How social inclusion unfolds through music involves social power dynamics of
who is included or excluded, and brings up the question of whether forms of domi-
nation are re-inscribed through so-called inclusionary processes (Raschig 2011).
Policies of social inclusion usually mean inclusion of the formerly excluded
within existing socio-economic hierarchies. Araújo and Cambria, however, explain
how a music project in which they work in a favela of Rio de Janeiro presents
opportunities to create some different social structures through using Paulo Freire’s
participatory strategies of dialogic learning. New knowledge generated by the pro-
ject includes understandings and representations (including scholarly articles and
a sound archive (Araújo 2008)) of musical genres listened to by favela youth (like
funk, pagode, and forró) that resist a tendency for the genres to be represented as
being in bad taste, and therefore undeserving of study or preservation. The music
genres have been persecuted in popular discourse in Brazil and, especially in the
case of the subgenre funk putaria (“whoredom funk”), in legal actions taken by the
Rio de Janeiro state government.
By contrast, I consider how musical encounters in a Canadian urban-poverty
context may shift human experiences of relative deprivation that are relevant to
well-being and health. Relative deprivation refers to individuals and groups, who
experience the deprivations of poverty, subjectively perceiving themselves as being
unfairly disadvantaged compared to a reference group (what the poor perceive that
they “should” have). My analysis draws on the health gradient, which refers to
how a person’s experiences of relative socio-economic status compared to other
people in society can determine his or her health levels and mortality rates. I find
that music programmes and projects occurring in Vancouver’s socio-economically
depressed Downtown Eastside have social structures that promise better socio-
economic status-related health outcomes for the people who facilitate them, com-
pared to the poor who participate in them. Many of these projects aim at generating
creative industries through skill building in musical performance. In so doing, they
replicate socio-economic (status) inequities of those industries in Canadian society
while offering limited socio-economic benefits to the poor.
Dirksen’s article questions what is made possible when musicians from the
Haitian rap group Wucamp undertake what she calls “cultural actions” to address
their circumstances. Members of Wucamp live in deprivation of requirements for

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harrison the relationship of poverty to music 7

meeting basic needs, especially with lack of sanitation. The rappers take the non-
musical action of cleaning up trash on the streets of Port-au-Prince, and rap about
their volunteer-based initiative. This music extends a history since the 1960s in
Haiti of a genre-crossing expressive form meaning “engaged music,” mizik angaje,
addressing poverty-related themes through song lyrics. Dirksen accepts local and
commonsensical notions of poverty. In my estimation her data also implicates the
notion of capability in poverty scholarship. Amartya Sen, who won the Nobel Prize
in Economics in 1998, posited that poverty should be defined as a lack of capa-
bilities and functionings. “The concept of ‘functionings,’ ” Sen writes, “reflects the
various things that a person may value doing or being. The valued functions may
vary from elementary ones such as being adequately nourished and being free from
avoidable disease, to very complex activities or personal states, such as being able
to take part in the life of the community and having self-respect” (Sen 1999:75). “A
functioning is an achievement, whereas a capability is the ability to achieve” (ibid.
1987:36). Dirksen’s case study suggests that even though music is a social act that
can take on just about any meaning, and making music means having capability,
musical capability does not necessarily mean temporary or permanent gain in non-
musical areas of social deprivation that may be understood to constitute poverty.
Mizik angaje lyrics about poverty have not resulted in an absence of trash on the
streets of Port-au-Prince.3 As Sen observes, enjoying freedom of agency is not nec-
essarily commensurate with achieving freedom towards well-being, in which he
includes the absence of poverty (Sen 1992:59–62). Dirksen submits, however, that
Wucamp’s actions constitute an instance of community-led development. Change
often begins small.
The human-development approach to poverty—which is substantially
influenced by Sen’s ideas, including that in the United Nations Development
Programme—concerns removing obstacles to what a person can do in life, such
as ill health, lack of access to resources, or lack of civil and political freedoms.
Human-development approaches intertwine with the promotion of capitalist devel-
opment globally. The UNDP’s Human Poverty Index is one quantitative measure
used in the human-development approach. The Human Poverty Index measures
several dimensions of human deprivation: a short life, particularly not surviving to
ages 40–60; a lack of basic education, measured by percentage of adult illiteracy;
and a lack of access to public and private resources, measured in terms of indicators
of a decent standard of living, especially sufficient economic provisioning (UNDP
2011).
Discussions of entitlements in the poverty literature refer to human experi-
ences which are widely understood as rights or are supported by legislation, for
example, human rights or well-being. Cultural rights constitute a subcategory of
human rights. Cultural rights are rarely explored in relation to poverty and music
(Weintraub and Young 2005). Moisala’s article concludes that there is a relation-
ship between cultural rights, and social exclusion and inclusion in socio-economic
systems. Moisala observes that although social exclusion of the Gāines has dimin-

3.  A Haitian government waste-management authority also cannot manage the garbage.

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8 2013 yearbook for traditional music

ished and their economic possibilities have increased after the abolishment of the
Hindu caste system in Nepal and in the context of a new socio-political and -eco-
nomic order, their cultural rights to their musical tradition, including being experts
in sāraṅgi performance, have weakened.

Theorizing culture, music, and poverty relationships

Theorizing culture, music, and poverty relationships is another main focus of

“Music and Poverty.” While culture–poverty relationships connect to the afore-
mentioned definitions of poverty, the relationships have shaped earlier scholarship
on culture that has influenced policies and politics globally.
For decades, the prominent if not most controversial and problematic theory of
culture and poverty was Oscar Lewis’s notion of the “culture of poverty.” Lewis
(1961) wrote that people living in cultures of poverty developed values and prac-
tices in order to cope with social and economic marginalization in capitalist society.
Cultural values and norms in turn guided the behaviour of individuals. In the intro-
duction to his book The Children of Sánchez, Lewis listed approximately fifty traits
that characterized behaviours of people living in cultural poverty, such as a sense
of marginality, helplessness, dependency, and not belonging. The culture of pov-
erty perspective, as developed by Oscar Lewis (1961, 1969) and Edward Banfield
(1974), argued that once a culture of poverty was in place, its cultural norms and
values perpetuated it even if structural conditions were to change. The culture of
the poor was to blame for continued poverty. Titon (this issue) points out that the
culture-of-poverty theory existed in mid-1960s politics and policies of the USA,
and led to the nation’s so-called war on poverty. Titon’s essay is somewhat different
from the others in this journal in that he was invited to reflect, in a shorter article,
on relationships of music and poverty that he observed during his career of research
on the music of an African American community of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and
of two Baptist groups in the Appalachian Mountains. In the tradition of writings
on poverty and politics, Titon’s is a polemic piece that critiques the applicability of
the culture-of-poverty theory and a discriminatory national policy to these targeted
(musical) cultures.
Since the 1960s, Lewis’s idea has been roundly criticized as “victim blaming”
by scholars and the general public. It also fell out of scholarly favour because it
was based on a Parsonian conception of culture as having a unitary and coherent set
of attributes that characterizes a social group. Many contemporary scholars absorb
practice-based definitions by Clifford Geetz and others in which culture “refers to
the meaning that human beings produce and mobilize to act on their environment
… Instead of having a culture, individuals exist in the midst of, respond to, use and
create cultural symbols” (Lamont and Small 2008:79).
Nevertheless, the idea of the culture of poverty persists in public debates and
news media. A 2010 New York Times article headline read, “ ‘Culture of Poverty,’
Long an Academic Slur, Makes a Comeback” (18 October 2010:A1). The idea
is also propagated in some areas of employment expertise. An editorial memo in

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harrison the relationship of poverty to music 9

The Nurse Practitioner, titled “Understanding the Culture of Poverty,” counsels

middle-class nurses on what is the culture of poverty in the USA so that the nurses
can avoid frustration with the behaviour of poor patients (Pearson 2003).
Is it ever useless to blame specific people for poverty? Economic-poverty issues
result from an unequal distribution of wealth. This is not the dominant view in most
polemic writing on poverty. For example, through a series of moral philosophical
arguments, Thomas Pogge on one occasion controversially attributed the respon-
sibility for inflicting the ongoing harm that is world poverty to people who form
the current global economic order, especially citizens of affluent countries who,
he claimed, could have solved the problem of world poverty decades ago had they
so wished (Pogge 2002). Taking a different approach, Titon argues against blam-
ing the poor for their poverty, which the culture-of-poverty theory seems to do,
and against blaming people. Titon sees a need to change broader social patterns
involving people nonetheless: “It wasn’t a culture of poverty that kept the people
poor. It was the extractive industries, the absentee corporations, and the politics of
corruption that did so.” The US war on poverty “aimed at the wrong target” (Titon,
this issue).
Alternative terminologies that connect poverty with culture have emerged
beyond “culture of poverty.” Ullrich H. Laaser’s term “poverty culture” also
removes blame from the poor about who causes poverty. He criticizes “the unequal
distribution of global goods, capital and employment” (Laaser 1997:48). Rather,
Laaser focuses on cultural responses to material poverty:

Dissociated from the bourgeois middle-class, the poverty cultures of low-income

classes and economics are developing. Based on the pressures of impoverishment
and the need to survive, their cultures emerge from the grass-roots level of everyday
life, coping with problems and deficiencies of their daily environment, and creating
new, sometimes unknown cultural responses. (Laaser 1997:53)

Cultural responses to poverty can be musical. Laaser writes that the “harshness
of everyday life and the struggle for survival are reflected in a variety of songs,
stories, jokes, festivities, cults, myths, colours, rhythms, ways of coping with work,
hope, anger, pain, fun, love, mourning, and happiness” (ibid.). Laaser points out
that popular-music genres such as cancan, flamenco, czardas, jazz, blues, samba,
tango, mambo, rock, reggae, and hip-hop “to a great extent are all a result of pov-
erty and migrant cultures” (ibid.:54).
Extending the list of types of social deprivation that may constitute poverty,
Stefan Fiol’s article in this journal theorizes the term cultural poverty. By cul-
tural poverty, Fiol means the absence or reduction of the means to express cul-
ture, which he defines as “the shared habits of thought, feeling, and action that
bind individuals to social collectives” (Fiol, this issue). Fiol understands musi-
cal poverty as a subcategory of cultural poverty. His ethnographic descriptions of
music of the Uttarakhand Himalayas of North India deal mainly with discourses of
cultural poverty, which he breaks down into discourses of lack and discourses of
loss that variously represent perspectives of “culture as commodity” and “culture
as heritage.” Fiol traces the roles of modernization and industrialization in such

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10 2013 yearbook for traditional music

discourses and perspectives when Uttarakhandis and their musical practices are
socio-economically marginalized in relation to an industrial “centre,” the North
Indian plains. Yet descriptions of musical poverty are also found elsewhere in this
journal issue. Moisala identifies a poverty of musical performances and instru-
ment uses among Gāine/Gandharva musicians in Nepal when discussing problems
faced by the group to sustain their cultural rights. Araújo and Cambria call attention
to misrepresentations and misunderstandings of musical poverty—by which they
mean “lack of music”—existing in favelas of Rio de Janeiro, but which are used
to motivate music-performance education programmes in non-local musics offered
by NGOs.
Cultural poverty and musical poverty should not be understood only as emphatic
ways to refer to the lack of culture and music, or misrepresentations thereof. The
ideas are used here to foreground the various connections between cultural and
musical lack and loss (actual or constructed), and socio-economic conditions. For
instance, the articles by Araújo and Cambria, and me, discuss NGOs and other
institutions offering cultural programmes in socio-economically depressed urban
areas in Brazil and Canada, which are motivated by narratives explicating or impli-
cating the lack of particular kinds of music, musical skill, and education, as well
as other cultural formations. The programmes encourage supposedly “lacking”
music or musical knowledge, and sustain and develop certain cultural formations
through music—in my Canadian example, human experiences of status of educa-
tion, income, and occupation (occurring within culture and society), which other-
wise are implied to be lacking according to narratives of music-project organizers,
media workers, and some participants. The Brazilian and Canadian programmes
also involve infrastructures with economic drivers, such as systems of employ-
ment, that run the music programmes and aim at employment-related goals for
music participants. Such programmes at least superficially seem to aim to resist
income-based poverty and support livelihood sustainability of the poor, but as
my Canadian case study suggests, the question of which socio-economic categories
of individuals actually benefit in terms of income, employment, and related educa-
tion, and to what extent, should be asked if human health is a consideration. The
terms “cultural poverty” and “musical poverty” can be used to put into relationship
and to analyse connections between a couple of dictionary definitions of poverty:
scantiness of a (cultural or musical) property or ingredient, and the human condi-
tion of being poor.
The “Music and Poverty” articles that follow thus offer a number of new
observations about relationships between music and poverty issues, for instance,
on how ethnomusicologists might approach musical practices in relation to pov-
erty, or discourses and narratives of such lack and loss (Araújo and Cambria, Fiol,
Harrison), in relation to deprivation and poverty; on what is the relationship of
music to the culture-of-poverty theory (Titon); on how enhancing socio-economic
status through music initiatives impacts and does not impact human health and
well-being (Harrison); on how musicians may undertake activism on basic needs
not being met (Dirksen); and on what are the relationships between music and the
poverty issues of social exclusion and cultural rights (Moisala). It is the hope of the

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harrison the relationship of poverty to music 11

authors that their articles stimulate further thinking on the dynamic relationships
between music and the multidimensional phenomenon of poverty.

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