This thesis focuses upon ‘Do-it-Yourself’ (DiY) music practices in Glasgow, a Scottish
city with an established reputation for sustaining a prolific grassroots music scene. With
special reference to three local music actors – a band, a music collective and a live
music promoter – it explores ethnographically the pluralistic nature of music-making
and its relation to ethics. Rather than perceiving activities under the DiY rubric as
peripheral and haphazard, I argue that they play an intrinsic role in ethical self-formation
and that they are striking in their capacity to order the lives of urban
individuals. Therefore, I attend to music practice as an ethical practice by underscoring
the interrelationship between music and the city as a distinctive form of ethical urban
life.
In drawing upon the emergent anthropology of ethics and echoing the work of authors
such as Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, I conceive of music-making as a process
of intersubjective ethical cultivation, as a way of exercising freedom, and the means by
which my informants perpetually sought to exert their right to inhabit the locality. In
treating the local as a series of repetitive but ever evolving and intersecting pathways as
opposed to a given and fixed geographical entity, I attempt to render the city an inherent
ethical modality of social life and, conversely, to scrutinize music practice as a process
that localizes subjects.
Thus, my ethnographic examination of the ways in which urban space impinges upon
music practice and, in turn, is musically constructed and experienced, offers a lens into
the ethical resonance of music as a processual nexus for the making of ethical selves
and cities. My informants’ desire to inhabit the locality on their own terms was
predicated upon the active appropriation and enactment of spaces and norms, rather than
oscillating between passivity or subordination and resistance. This highlights the needs
to problematize the pervasive notion of ‘agency’ that underpins social-scientific
accounts of human freedom and to question the rigidity of the dichotomy between
structure and agency.
An emphasis on ethical judgement and the pedagogical role of music activity in
conferring a DiY êthos and in making oneself a certain kind of person also requires the
consideration of the embodied dispositions pertinent to and cultivated through
variegated music practices, and how the acquisition of relevant musical skills
simultaneously engenders particular ethical potentialities. This construes ethics as
Aristotelian poiêsis and an ineluctably skilled practice and further alludes to the
intimate relationship between music and the body.
In resorting to the body’s capacity to affect and be affected by music and other bodies,
my analysis aims to account for the conditioning of sensuous articulations and corporeal
registers by sonic vocabularies, and the process of interpenetration between the musical
and the visceral that elicits specific ethical propensities. This interface between sound
and the affective body, I argue, provides a uniquely ‘musical’ way of thinking about
ethics as a relational phenomenon, and also helps to restore a notion of politics on the
basis of intersubjective ethical transformation rather than conventional political efficacy
in the public realm
