Music, Power, and Practice

Author(s): Maureen Mahon

Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Spring/Summer 2014), pp. 327-333
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology
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Vol. 58, No. 2 Ethnomusicology Spring/Summer 2014

Music, Power, and Practice

Maureen Mahon / New York University

I am aware that, on the eve of the 2012 United States presidential election, it
may seem like sidestepping “real politics” and the “real issues” to talk about
cultural politics. Still, I want to do so because thinking in terms of cultural
politics enables us to examine the ways in which people debate, reproduce, and
sometimes change power relations through their engagements with expressive
culture. I’ll even go so far as to say that through engagement with expressive
culture people respond to and deal with “real politics” and “real issues.”
By training, I am a cultural anthropologist; my primary area of research is
on music making and in my current position I teach on the ethnomusicology
track of a music department. As such, I feel strong ties to both ethnomusicol-
ogy and cultural anthropology and view them as distinct but closely related
fields. Working from this culture and music orientation, I believe it is crucial to
take seriously the relationship between expressive culture and other facets of
social life, and to consider the ways artists and audiences use forms like dance,
literature, film, the visual arts, and of course, music, to express their identities
and beliefs, to advance critiques, to evoke emotions, and to encourage action. I
want to argue for a socially, culturally, and aesthetically engaged analysis of the
ways individuals and groups make, disseminate, and experience these forms.
This type of layered approach can reveal the production of meaning, while also
accounting for the pleasure-giving aspects of these forms, the very qualities that
draw artists, audiences, and academics to them in the first place. At the same
time, we can explore the power dynamics and power relations that shape and
are shaped by these forms.
To that end, I want to talk about music and politics in three distinct but
related ways, all of which use an expansive definition that understands politics as
having to do with the dynamics of power and moves beyond the more t­ raditional,

© 2014 by the Society for Ethnomusicology

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328  Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2014

circumscribed definition that centers on electoral politics and formal political

movements. I’ll talk about the ways research about music and politics can reveal
existing relations of power, and about some of the ways ethnomusicologists
might navigate the dynamics of power within the academy. I’ll start, though,
by mentioning some of the ways the connection between music and politics
unfolds in my own work.
I have learned that I need to pay attention to power in order to understand
the music-making processes and music scenes in which the people I write about
are engaged. In my research on African American musicians, it has been produc-
tive to emphasize questions like the following: Who has creative and economic
control? Which people and assumptions dictate terms, not only of the creative
work produced by artists but also of the critical and scholarly writing about
it? What is the extent to which musicians can use their agency to assert their
creative voices? When and why do they have to capitulate to dominant expec-
tations? Under what conditions and for what reasons do they resist or subvert
them? What are the ways that the race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and
generation of an artist shape his or her professional experiences and aesthetic
choices? What happens when these categories of identity collide with another
system of categorization—that of musical genre?
Recording industry marketing experts and professional music critics de-
fine music genres and assign artists to the categories they deem appropriate.
Scholarship on music genres demonstrates that these processes are about much
more than musical sound (Holt 2007, Miller 2010, Negus 1999). Extra-musical
factors, such as race, ethnicity, gender, class, and nationality influence which
genre an artist is slotted into, and genre shapes the ways in which an artist is
marketed to audiences as well as the creative parameters within which an artist
is expected to work.
In my previous research on the Black Rock Coalition, an organization of
African American musicians founded to challenge prevailing ideas about black
music and identity, and in my ongoing historical research on black women in
rock and roll, I have found it productive to consider the way the social identity of
the artist affects placement into market categories, reception, and career trajec-
tory (Mahon 2004, 2011). It has also been productive to explore the ways popular
music genres have been fashioned in the United States, and how and why they
have changed over time. These seemingly neutral categories are underwritten
by socially constructed ideas about which types of people should participate in
which musical forms. Furthermore, these genre classifications are informed by
the ways we think about identity beyond the realm of music, and they in turn
affect the ways we think about identity beyond that realm.
As is probably obvious, my approach to music and power is informed by
practice theory, a way to reckon with human action and its limits, with the ways

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 Mahon: Music, Power, and Practice  329

people work within and against institutions, and with agency and structure
(Bourdieu 1990, Giddens 1979, Ortner 2006). Cultural anthropologist, Sherry
Ortner, advocates a practice-centered approach that is anchored in the rich de-
tails of ethnographic research and attentive to power and history (see also Berger
and Del Negro 2004). Practice theory prioritizes attention to the processes of
social construction that produce the identities, institutions, and ideas that often
become naturalized and seem unchangeable. This perspective reminds us that
our interlocutors make and can potentially remake the world, even if they must
do so in conditions not of their own choosing. To avoid being seduced by “the
romance of resistance”1 when considering this possibility, I have found it useful
to take seriously feminist anthropologist Dorinne Kondo’s insistence that we
recognize the dialectic of resistance and complicity that is often present in the
work of cultural producers. Awareness of this “complicitous critique” (Kondo
1997: 144), allows us, Kondo argues, to recognize the tenacious nature of power
relations and avoid misrepresenting the complexity and contradictions of the
work of the musicians we are researching. Similarly, Ortner prods ethnographers
to attend to “the ambivalences and ambiguities of resistance itself ” and to rec-
ognize the complexity of resistance (Ortner 2006:62). Using practice theory, we
can reveal people’s potential to change their worlds, while remaining mindful of
the political interests and structural patterns that shape the ways social relations
and social categories are constructed, reproduced, and sustained.
Issues of power in relation to music also come into play when we choose
our research topics. My current work on African American women and rock
and roll departs from the perspective that guides the conventional discussions
of rock history that emphasize the so-called “great men” of rock: Bob Dylan,
the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and other luminaries. Placing black women at
the center of inquiry disrupts what some commentators have identified as the
“rockist” bias in popular music studies, a viewpoint that privileges the guitar-
centered music production of “self-contained” instrumentalists who write, sing,
and play their own music as the sine qua non of rock to the detriment of vocal-
ists who perform material written by others (Warwick 2007). This perspective
creates racialized and gendered divisions and hierarchies that separate women
and people of color from rock, which, in this worldview, is the apex of pop music
creativity and the purview of white men. Recent feminist scholarship of popular
music exposes and challenges these power dynamics and the prevailing assump-
tions that marginalize women in discussions of rock and roll (e.g., Brooks 2008,
Dawes 2012, Gaar 2002, Retman 2006, Warwick 2007) In my work in progress,
I try to listen beyond these constructed musical values in order to reveal black
women’s ongoing presence in the genre and consider the reasons for its erasure.
In her landmark study on black feminist thought, Patricia Hill Collins argues
that this kind of shifting of focus to under-recognized practices can challenge a

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330  Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2014

power structure that has named and defined black women into and outside of
certain categories, behaviors, and identities (Collins 1990: 68).2 At the same time,
through detailed attention to specific people and contexts—that is, through the
kind of study that is emblematic of ethnomusicology—we can trace the extent
to which individuals and groups accept, resist, or reject the dominant terms.
Acknowledging the relationship between power and music is also crucial
to our ability as scholars to even recognize that a subject is worth talking about
and to find productive ways to carry on our conversations in the academy.
Our research routinely attends to the context in which musicians produce their
work. Similarly, our strategizing about how we, as ethnographers of music, can
contribute to academic discourse should attend to the relations of power and
the disciplinary politics at play in the arenas in which we produce and circulate
our scholarship. Since my time as a graduate student, I have proceeded from
the perspective that black rock and roll musicians working in the United States
are an acceptable subject for a professional scholar. I know that this is not a
given; academic politics define certain types of music and certain categories of
musicians as worthy of scholarly attention while excluding others. We need to
address disciplinary value systems that may still devalue work on popular and
commercial music or question the validity of certain types of popular music as
subjects for research. I was fortunate to be trained by scholars who approved a
black rock-centered dissertation prospectus and supported my interest in do-
ing research “at home” (i.e., in the United States) in “my own community” (i.e.,
among fellow African Americans). Ethnomusicologists and anthropologists
increasingly accept research that is close to home; still, there is a tendency to
privilege the model of ethnographic research on faraway others. Those of us who
mentor graduate students should still take care when we advise them as they
choose field sites and subjects. What assumptions are we supporting when we
direct them away from some topics and point them towards others?
Finally, as we talk about power and politics in relation to music, we should
consider power and politics in the academy, which is itself a site replete with
complex power dynamics. I hear in Berger’s call for this session a desire to think
through the ways ethnomusicology can speak to other fields, as well as an anxi-
ety about the visibility and audibility of ethnomusicology. Does what we do as
ethnographers of music matter if other scholars don’t engage our ideas or cite
our writings? In what ways can our research be relevant to social and political
debates? Or even, will we ever be invited to be expert talking heads on news
programs and documentaries in the way that sociologists and historians are?
Ethnomusicology and its sibling discipline, cultural anthropology, share and
struggle with these anxieties precisely because the methodology that makes
them strong is a liability in an era of sound bytes; the close focus on fine-grained
analysis of often numerically small and not always representative groups makes

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 Mahon: Music, Power, and Practice  331

it difficult to generalize. Our studies of music-making and music-consuming are

rooted in an analysis developed through grounded, experiential study—field-
work, interviews, musical analysis, performance analysis, and participation in
and observation of music-making. The ethnographies we produce about the
contemporary people, music, culture, and politics that we learn about through
long-term research are significant forms of documentation that contain powerful
insights. The writing of ethnography is, in a sense, writing history for the future,
a very valuable enterprise. Would it be productive to make a conscious effort to
speak beyond our case studies and make clear links to broader social, cultural,
and political themes?
Ethnomusicology is, in terms of the sheer number of practitioners, not a
large discipline, making it a challenge for our work to have a large impact on the
academy. However, music is a sexy research topic, and there are many scholars
not trained in music studies who “do music.” It would be productive for our
field if ethnomusicologists spoke and published in venues where these fellow
travelers could easily hear and read us. At least at face value, this should not be
a difficult leap. Many of us already work in an interdisciplinary mode. Indeed,
ethnomusicologists are voracious borrowers of ideas and approaches from other
fields—feminism, gender studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies,
literary studies, philosophy, history, sociology, economics, and political science.
There is no single ethnomusicology theory driving our interdisciplinary, music-
centered intellectual pursuits; nevertheless, it may be possible to articulate an
“ethnomusicological perspective” that highlights the significance of music in
social life and examines the relationships between music, politics, and culture
that Berger flagged as being of great enough importance to be the subject of his
President’s Roundtable. Speaking from our disciplinary position and capitalizing
on our interdisciplinary tendencies, we can continue our efforts to explore music
as product that we discuss through close readings of musical materials and music
as process that we discuss through historically, socially, and culturally situated
analyses of people’s music-related beliefs and practices.
Moving in this direction might facilitate efforts to reach out to researchers
in other fields who share our interest in cultural politics. By publishing in the
relevant journals outside of the discipline of ethnomusicology and expanding the
slate of conferences we attend, we could be in conversation with scholars who
share our broader interests. We should give some consideration to what we might
say to them, musically, intellectually, and politically. I realize that this statement
requires an accompanying comment recognizing the politics of publishing and
the expectations of peer committees reviewing ethnomusicologists for tenure
and promotion. We should also think about the politics of writing: When we
talk about “reaching a broader audience,” what exactly do we have in mind? Do
we hope our writing will circulate outside of ethnomusicology, outside of music

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332  Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2014

studies, outside of the academy? What might facilitating this circulation entail?
Should we use language and formulations that have academic currency, but that
may be inaccessible or completely unappealing to nonacademic readers? How
much musical transcription or formal musical exegesis is too much for a reader
not trained in musical notation? Alternatively, do we have too little transcription
and formal analysis to appeal to those in musicology and music theory? We need
to think strategically about the venues we choose and the voices we use.
This joint conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American
Musicological Society, and the Society for Music Theory is a significant step to-
ward forging connections among music studies scholars. It would be interesting
to consider a joint venture with anthropologists, performance studies scholars,
and ethnic and regional studies scholars who share our interests in the cultural
politics of music and expressive culture. Through these encounters, we could
continue the processes that Berger has initiated here by convening this panel:
taking stock of the field, listening to others from within ethnomusicology and
beyond, and thinking about where we might go as we study the pleasures and
politics of music-making.

Notes
1. Cultural anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod (1990) coined this term to describe the tendency
in resistance studies to overstate the resistance of subordinated groups.
2. Studies by African American feminist ethnomusicologists Kyra Gaunt (2006) and Eileen
Hayes (2010) of black women’s cultural productions demonstrate the power of ethnographic rep-
resentation to challenge limited ideas about African American culture and identity.

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