LOCAL MUSICKING i n c ross -cu l tu ra l perspect ive

Greek band ‘Checkmate in 2 Flats’ at a festival on Paros Island (Photo by Dimitris Miyakis, 2009)

A folia de reis brings the blessings of the Three Kings to a family in the community in Campanha, Brazil (Photo by Antonio Ribeiro, 2009)

Musicians of a Nigerian- initiated Pentecostal church in Athens, Greece (Photo by Evanthia Patsiaoura, 2013)

ICRH Research Group 2014-2015

Suze l Ana Re i l y

(School of Creative Arts)

Ioann i s T s iou lak i s

(School of History & Anthropology)

International Symposium

17-18 April 2015 Queen’s University Belfast Performance Room, G06 13 University Square

For more information, please contact:

s.reily@qub.ac.uk or i.tsioulakis@qub.ac.uk

Speakers:

Michael Alcorn

Gregory Barz

Reginaldo Braga

Kate Brucher

Ray Casserly

Martin Clayton

Martin Dowling

Trevor Herbert

Kirstin McGee

Suzel Reily

Maria do Rosário Pestana

Rose Satiko Hikiji

Ioannis Tsioulakis

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Local Musicking in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Sponsored by the ICRH

Queen’s University Belfast

17 and 18 April, 2015

Programme

(Unless otherwise indicated, sessions will take place in the

Performance Room, G06, 13 University Square, QUB)

FRIDAY 17 APRIL

9.00 Registration (Common Room, G01, 13 University Square)

10.00 Welcome – Prof John Thompson, Director of ICRH

10.15 Suzel Reily (Queen’s University Belfast)

Getting Started: Ethnomusicology and/or ‘Local Musicking’

10.45 Trevor Herbert (Open University)

Amateur Music Makers, their Localities and the Challenges They Have Faced –

the Lessons of History

11.30 Coffee/Tea (Common Room, G01, 13 University Square)

12.00 Katherine Brucher (DePaul University)

What Makes Music Local?

12.45 Lunch

2.00 Reginaldo Braga (Universidade do Rio Grande do Sul)

Musical Azoreanism in Southern Brazil: Transforming and Reorganizing old

Traditions or (Re)Inventing a Tradition based on Recent Atlantic Routes

2.45 Martin Dowling (Queen’s University Belfast)

Irish Traditional Music: Local, Regional, and National Contexts

3.30 Coffee/Tea (Common Room, G01, 13 University Square)

4.00 Michael Alcorn (Queen’s University Belfast) and members of Downshire Brass

Labour & Love: Reflections on contemporary brass banding

5.30 Wine reception / dinner (McMordie Hall, Music Building, QUB)

7.30 Concert of Local Musicking (Harty Room, Music Building, QUB)

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SATURDAY 18 APRIL

9.30 Ray Casserly (CIEE)

Localising the National: Preforming Northern Ireland’s Identities in Local

Communities

10.15 Gregory Barz (Vanderbilt University)

Rethinking ‘Local’ in Inherited and Indigenized Musicking: Theorizing Post-

Colonial Choral Music in Tanzanian (East Africa)

11.00 Coffee/Tea (Common Room, G01, 13 University Square)

11.30 Rose Satiko Hikiji (Universidade de São Paulo)

Immersion, Mimesis and Corporality - Ethnography of Musical Learning in a

Social Project for Children and Youth in São Paulo, Brazil

12.15 Maria do Rosário Pestana (Universidade de Aveiro)

Music In-Between: the ‘Orfeonismo’ Movement and Choral Singing in Portugal

(1880-2012). Outcomes of a Research Project Developed at the University of

Aveiro (2012-14)

1.00 Lunch

2.00 Kirstin McGee (University of Groningen)

Remixing Jazz Culture: Dutch Crossover Collectivities and Hybrid Economies in

the Late-Capitalist Era

2.45 Ioannis Tsioulakis (Queen’s University Belfast)

Reimagining Locality through Materiality: Musicians Turn into Artisans

3.30 Coffee/Tea (Common Room, G01, 13 University Square)

4.00 Martin Clayton (University of Durham)

Summing Up: Themes in the Study of Local Musicking

4.30 Discussion

5.30 Conclusion

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Presentation Abstracts

(in programme order)

Trevor Herbert (Open University)

Amateur Music Makers, their Localities and the Challenges They Have Faced –

the Lessons of History

It is undoubtedly true that amateur communal music making is usually a part of a wider

range of activities that contribute to and express local identity. It is also true that there is a

set of relationships between music makers and the local communities in which they exist that

imply benefits and responsibilities on both sides. At their best, these relationships form an

integration. However, for this type of integration to endure it must fend off important

challenges that come from within the process of music making and from without. The internal

influences come from the way that music making affects performers - it changes them. The

external influences come from new cultural and social trends, the interventions of commerce

and the alliances that music makers have to any national organisations to which they may be

affiliated.

This presentation takes the British brass band as its main (but not sole) model for

historical illustration and will use a small number of case studies to examine both the

strengths and vulnerabilities of the relationship between amateur music makers and their

localities. It will look at the structures that have supported integration and the forces that

have challenged it. It will also draw on historical examples to suggest ways in which the ideal

of the social integration of music making has been appropriated for commercial purposes.

Examples will be drawn from Welsh music, the brass band movement in Britain, the

practices of the Salvation Army and the construction of local and national music traditions in

the USA in the early twentieth century.

Katherine Brucher (DePaul University)

What Makes Music Local?

What makes a music event local? This presentation takes a daylong performance by the

Sociedade Filarmónica de Covões, an amateur community wind band, at a feast day in central

Portugal as a case study for exploring for how participants invest musicking with a sense of

locality. Portuguese bandas filarmónicas and feast days make an ideal case study for

exploring how identity, locality, and place intersect in myriad ways as bands and feast

participants tend to emphasize the importance of terra, or hometown, as a common identity

even when individuals may actually come from many different localities. I contend that what

makes a band’s performance at a feast resonate locally has to do as much with what happens

as it does with where it happens. Furthermore, although a performance may be a focal point

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of a feast day, it is framed by a full-range of activities that include planning, preparing, and

producing the event, and its aftermath, that contribute to the sense of working for a common

community. My analysis draws from extensive ethnographic work with the Sociedade

Filarmónica de Covões, including participation in the band as a saxophonist, observations of

feasts, and interviews with band members and feast participants. Locality emerges as a

discourse that is rooted in place, but constructed through interactions and sociability

centered on a common commitment to musicking for and within a particular community.

Reginaldo Braga (Universidade do Rio Grande do Sul)

Musical Azoreanism in Southern Brazil: Transforming and Reorganizing old

Traditions or (Re)Inventing a Tradition based on Recent Atlantic Routes

This research project intends to investigate the historic and current processes in the

construction of the Azoreanism movement (or Afro-Azorean in some cases) in the state of Rio

Grande do Sul, in the extreme south of Brazil, mediated and/or spread through musical

conceptions and representations about this remote past. This movement highlights towns

related to XVIII century Azorean settlements, such as Gravataí and Viamão, close to Porto

Alegre (capital of state and associated with Azorean traditions), and on the coastline,

including Osório, Tramandaí, Santo Antônio da Patrulha among others. In these places such

musical groups as Chão de Areia and Cantadores do Litoral, devotional catholic groups like

Folias do Divino, Ternos de Reis, Ensaio de Promessa and folkloric groups like Dança do

Masquê take part in actualizing and negotiating this past. The agency of individuals in the

creation and continuity of an “Azorean authenticity” and government politics to support and

provide incentive to the so-called “Azorean culture rescues” are important too. In the past, the

Governo Autônomo dos Açores formulated courses and programmes for cultural training and

for stimulating local activists in the Azorean diaspora. So, I will discuss here the interlocution

amongst individuals, social groups and governments around popular and folkloric culture

through a multifocal investigation to capture the contemporary identities procedures

involved in the trans-nationalization of the Azoreanism.

Martin Dowling (Queen’s University Belfast)

Irish Traditional Music: Local, Regional, and National Contexts

This paper considers local, regional, and national contexts of the evolution of traditional

music with a particular northeast Ulster and Northern Ireland. The geographical evolution of

styles in 19th century Ireland will be sketched concisely, highlighting the dynamic whereby

broad musical and socioeconomic trends resulted in the incubation of distinct practices,

resulting in a 20th century inheritance of a geographic fabric of stylistic variation on common

forms. The rise of the idea of the "regional style" as an ideological framework of practice is

then juxtaposed to concepts of a national tradition and a global marketplace, and in the

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context of the NI Peace Process, of concepts of two (or three) cultural traditions. In

conclusion, the integrity of "local musicking" in Irish traditional music in the contemporary

conjuncture is called into question.

Michael Alcorn (Queen’s University Belfast) and members of Downshire Brass

Labour & Love: Reflections on contemporary brass banding

The title, borrowed from one of the earliest original works of brass band music, sums up the

ethos behind this enduring form of community music-making. In a panel chaired by Michael

Alcorn, participants from Belfast’s Downshire Brass will explore issues around life in a brass

band and the role that music-making plays in their lives.

Ray Casserly (CIEE)

Localising the National: Preforming Northern Ireland’s Identities in Local

Communities

Marching bands in Northern Ireland dominate the cultural and political landscape throughout

the summer months as the annual marching season, totalling over 4,000 parades annually,

reaches its zenith in the month of July. With the majority of these parades organised by

members of the Protestant Unionist Loyalist tradition, concepts of national, religious, political,

and ethnic identity are performed and enacted on the streets and roads throughout the

province. These parades are often largely comprised of Protestant fraternal organisations and

the predominantly male marching bands they hire to participate.

These bands are formed as locally based music groups, comprising mostly of

members from their immediate community. In the local community halls and venues of rural

towns and urban housing estates throughout the province, these music groups congregate

weekly to learn and perform their music. Often more than one generation from local families

are represented in the bands’ membership, firmly connecting the band the local community.

These music groups also incorporate an unambiguous aspect of their local community into

their name i.e. The Shankill Road Defenders Flute Band.

However, as the month of July approaches, the foci of bands and their members move

from locally oriented performances – from fundraising band parades and concerts – to

nationally oriented commemorative parades, such as the ‘Battle of the Somme’ and ‘Battle of

the Boyne’ commemorative parades.

This research presents how members of bands imagine and articulate their role in the local

community as a form of community support through the provision of invaluable resources to

the youth in their community. Parallel to this musicians (and public representatives of the

Protestant tradition) have claimed that bands and parades serve the benefit of the wider

Protestant tradition through celebrating the historical, musical, and religious aspects of their

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cultural heritage. The discourse between these two positions conflates the local with the

national as the musicians and band members consider their music performances as

representative of both the local and the wider group identity.

Gregory Barz (Vanderbilt University)

Rethinking ‘Local’ in Inherited and Indigenized Musicking: Theorizing Post-

Colonial Choral Music in Tanzanian (East Africa)

In this paper I reflect on theoretical models used in ethnomusicology for positioning inherited

singing traditions (colonial, mission) alongside local (native, indigenous) singing traditions in

order to introduce a (re-)definition of texts and musical repertoires employed by

contemporary choirs in post-independence Tanzania, East Africa. The everyday soundscapes

of Tanzanian kwayas (KiSwahili, “choirs”) suggest an ongoing cultural and religious exchange.

I ground my comments on fieldwork with kwayas to address Steven Kaplan’s

conceptualization of a localized response to Western Christianity. In their performances,

kwaya communities frequently confront religious discontent, alienation, and openly question

authority of church governance while internally addressing dichotomous constructions—

Western vs. African, indigenous vs. non-indigenous, old vs. new, evangelical vs. mainstream—

suggesting a kwaya’s active engagement of everyday spirituality and a sophisticated

understanding of the development, change, and adaptation experienced by many musical

traditions within African contexts.

A secondary element of this paper is a reflection on the emergence of studies of local

Christian performance in musical ethnography. I consider, for example, a critical moment in

the 1990s when elements of Christian religious praxis were still received as “pollution” to

indigenous cultural stylistics by ethnomusicology and other academic disciplines. With the

intervention of ethnographies by young (at the time!) scholars (Muller, Sherinian, Reily, Barz,

and others) ethnomusicology re-evaluated its historical position on Christianity-as-culture.

Many of these works in the 1990s accomplished much by studying choral singing traditions.

While not intending to introduce a polemic, ethnomusicology’s relatively recent embrace of

localized Christian contexts begs a focus on the ways which discipline-specific theories are

onboarded and become mainstream.

Rose Satiko Hikiji (Universidade de São Paulo)

Immersion, Mimesis and Corporality - Ethnography of Musical Learning in a

Social Project for Children and Youth in São Paulo, Brazil

This paper presents some aspects involved in musical learning in a social project for children

and youth in São Paulo, Brazil. Reading, hearing, imitation and corporeality are part or the

teaching-learning process. The author did her research between 1999 and 2005 following the

activities of Projeto Guri, a governmental project that teaches music through the

organization of student's orchestras and choirs, mainly to low income children and teenagers

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(7 to 18 years old). The students have collective classes and rehearsals with the musical

groups twice a week. They are also stimulated to present performances to different types of

publics with their corresponding orchestras and choirs.

The focus of this presentation will be the musical classes of Guri Project, where an

intimate relation was observed between the transmission of musical knowledge and social

values. Special attention is given to one of the spaces occupied by the project: a detention

juvenile centre in which the male teenagers in conflict with the law were given the

opportunity to learn music. In this context, the relation between musicality and corporeality is

intensified: the musical body encounters with the "docile" body. Some of the questions are

addressed here: Which are the senses and meanings produced during the musical learning?

What's the relation between the sensible experience and a "sentimental education", as

formulated by Clifford Geertz? How knowledge and values are transmitted?

Maria do Rosário Pestana (Universidade de Aveiro)

Music In-Between: the ‘Orfeonismo’ Movement and Choral Singing in Portugal

(1880-2012). Outcomes of a Research Project Developed at the University of

Aveiro (2012-14)

Between 2012 and 2014, at the University of Aveiro, a team of researchers from the fields of

ethnomusicology, performance studies, musicology, sociology, and cultural studies, launched

a research project focused on a specific type of musical practices developed within private

societies named “orfeões”. Historically those practices that emerged shyly at the end of the

nineteen-century, expressed the ideals of the ‘orfeonismo’ movement, and were key agents of

social and cultural transformation in Portugal, since the establishment of the Republic in

1910. After a period of imposed restrictions during the autocratic regime of the military

dictatorship and the Estado Novo (1926-74), ‘orfeonismo’ resurged with the restoring of a

democratic regime after the ‘April Revolution’, in 1974. During more than a century marked

by important political and social transformations, the musical performance model endorsed

by these private societies persisted, conveying specific ways of expressing ideals, transmitting

values, ritualizing behaviours, and experiencing social roles. ‘Orfeonismo’ involved thousands

of individuals as members of institutionalized ‘orfeões’, private institutions. ‘Orfeões’

presented the binominal ideals of “Art” and “Progress” as their mottos, and promoted

socially-responsible leisure, choral singing, poetry, reading, education, through the

organization of courses, cultural and social events and performances. The research focuses on

the impact of ‘orfeonismo’ in domains such as local social life, musical practice and the

individuals that voluntarily sung, musical composition, and ethnography. It explores the ways

in which it created both hegemonic and political resistance practices. The research reveals

that ‘orfeonismo’ wove his own social space ‘in-between’ Western-art and popular music,

written and oral, amateur and professional, traditional and progressive, urban and rural

practices.

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Kirstin McGee (University of Groningen)

Remixing Jazz Culture: Dutch Crossover Collectivities and Hybrid Economies in

the Late-Capitalist Era

Recently, crossover jazz has profited from fruitful collaborations between a broader array of

arts participants. These fluid collaborations depend upon both live dance culture and the

highly-mediated world of domestic digital networks. Simultaneously, the renewed

interactivity of crossover European jazz collectivities betrays a growing interest by participants

and producers to disrupt normative expectations for live music. In 2010, for example, the

Dutch crossover jazz collectivity, Kyteman, a hip-hop, jazz group led by Colin Benders

sometimes features thirty musicians on stage, with a revolving line-up of MC’s,

instrumentalists and symphonic musicians. Online remixers enlist the group’s work to actively

participate in the collective, prompting references to Lessig’s “rewrite” conception of

contemporary culture. The impact of social networks and other mediated promotional

strategies further challenges traditional music industry structures. In this presentation, I

investigate the Netherlands’ most interactive crossover jazz collectives, assessing their impact

upon dance culture, traditional jazz culture, and popular culture. I further highlight the fluid

and intermediated nature of translocal collectivities. In particular, I query the hybrid activities

and musical performances of organizations within Utrecht to illuminate intersections between

public culture, digital media and crossover jazz collectivities as they transform European

hybrid cultures and musical values in the late-capitalist era.

Ioannis Tsioulakis (Queen’s University Belfast)

Reimagining Locality through Materiality: Musicians Turn into Artisans

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, musicians in Athens strived to build their identities based

on transnational/cosmopolitan affinities of taste. Having to make a living within a local music

industry that they often considered to be aesthetically and technically inferior, professional

Athenian instrumentalists preferred to identify with cosmopolitan imagined communities

based on style and genre ( jazz, rock, funk and so on) and constructed subcultures which

served them as heavens of musical ‘expression’ and ‘creativity’, and antidotes to their paid

session-work. Since the dawn of the Greek economic recession and austerity in 2010, the

cultural pluralism of the Athenian music scenes has declined, leaving musicians without paid

work and crushing their cosmopolitan aspirations. In response to this new environment some

musicians have turned into craftspersons, attempting to make a living out of the invention

and production of new musical gadgetry and instruments, effectively reconceptualising

themselves from ‘artists’ to ‘artisans’. Based on recent interviews, this paper will examine how

this identity shift has affected musicians’ local ‘belonging’, and illustrate the role of materiality

in forging new face-to-face communities.