Composing individuals: ethnographic reflections on success and prestige in the British New Music Network

In contrast to established musicians, lesser-known composers have received scant attention in art music scholarship. This article, based on an ethnographic study, considers how a group of British composers construed ideas of success and prestige, which I analyse in terms of anthropological writings on exchange, Bourdieusian symbolic economies, and Foucauldian notions of disciplinary power. Prestige was ascribed to composers who created ‘interesting’ music, a category that eclipsed novelty as an aim. Individuality, enacted within a context of individualism, was key to assessing whether music was interesting. This individuality had to be tempered, structured, and embedded in the social norms of this and related ‘art worlds’. The article examines the social processes involved in creating this individuality, musical personality, and music considered interesting

Aficionados, academics, and Danzón expertise: exploring hierarchies in popular music knowledge production

Amateur scholars, such as aficionados, fans, intellectuals, are rarely valued in the twenty-first-century academy, despite their often-encyclopedic knowledge. In this paper, I focus on Mexican aficionados of the popular Cuban music danzón to explore how these mostly older men manage social contexts where they are often marginalized. Drawing on Bourdieu, I examine how danzón aficionados negotiate their field of expertise by employing overlapping strategies: accumulating myriad "facts" and "truths", creating the possibility of ignorance in others, and competing for hegemonic masculine capital. I analyze danzón aficionados' relationships with musicians and dancers, consider power dynamics between these aficionados and academics, and draw on Léon and Romero to discuss relationships between regional and hegemonic scholarship more broadly. I argue that beyond reflexivity and criticism, collective activism is required to reconfigure value systems and symbolic economies, and to fight institutional pressures to reproduce existing power structure

New generations, older bodies: danzón, age and ‘cultural rescue’ in the Port of Veracruz, Mexico

Understandings and discourses about age have tended to be instrumental to popular music in terms of production, promotion and consumption, and many studies of popular music have taken younger people, and especially ‘youth’ cultures, as their subject matter. Where older people have been considered, the focus has mostly been retrospective, that is on their experiences when young and their attitudes to contemporary ‘youth’ cultures, rather than relationships between the temporal dimension of the life course and music. As the case of danzón illustrates, stereotypes that older people are resistant to novelty, change and possibility are ill founded. Moreover, where age is used to justify rescuing ‘cultural traditions’, caution may be called for and analysis required to assess what lies behind such claims and why. In Veracruz, the older age of the majority of danzón performers is evoked to ‘authenticate’ this local ‘tradition’, and justify its ‘rescue’ and promotion by Veracruz's culture industries. Yet, older people are not considered repositories of ‘tradition’ or sought out as ‘authentic’ practitioners. Instead, many older performers are new to danzón

La configuración racial del danzón: los imaginarios raciales del puerto de Veracruz

Note portant sur l’auteur Muchos estudios sobre música y bailes populares latinoamericanos han explorado simultáneamente procesos de raciali-zación y construcción de la nación (Moore, 1997; Vianna 1999; Wade, 2000). Este artículo presenta un caso donde la música y el baile local, así como las ideas sobre la “negritud”, no están asociados a la idea de nación: el puerto de Veracruz, México, y su música-baile popular, el danzón. Para esta exploración, un aspecto clave son los vínculos y tensione..

Gamelanguor

Gamelanguor, 2000, for large gamelan ensemble, 3 mins.First performed by the Royal College of Music and South Bank Gamelan Players, Bath Festival, 2000. Also broadcast on BBC Radio 3

Cinderella

Score for ‘Cinderella’. Adapted and directed by Jonathan Petherbridge for London Bubble Theatre Company. Cochrane Theatre, London, 2001-2002

Ice Girls

Score for ‘Ice Girls’. Documentary directed by Trish Dolman. 2002.Commissioned and broadcast by BBC2, and CTV (Canadian TV), 2002

On sensationalism, violence and academic knowledge

This essay interrogates methodological, analytical and representational issues that continue to challenge scholars addressing bellicose violence: Is it ethical to write about terror, pain and despair from afar? Can sensationalism ever be justified in analyses of bellicose violence? What kind of silences might we allow for? These questions are explored in relation to necropolitical Mexico, drawing from empirical research with musicians commissioned to write narco rap, producers and consumers of rap del barrio, and hip hop artists protesting the disappearances, homicides, systematic violence and impunity enjoyed by criminal organisations and state institutions alike

It's a Mitzvah

Score for ‘It's a Mitzvah’. Film directed by Fran Jacobson. 1994.Screenings include the National Film Theatre, London, and film festivals in New York, Montreal, Köln, Turin and Australia from 1994