This chapter outlines the intellectual history and conceptual framing that shape the presentation of ethnographic cases in the subsequent chapters. After a review of the models of music and ethics that informed the author’s prior assumptions, the chapter describes a conceptual frame that emerged over the course of fieldwork. The experience of music as ethics emerges at the intersection of four components of social thought: our general concept of ethics; our ideas about the nature of musical meaning; our attitudes about the good that music offers; and our beliefs about the proper ways to exchange and distribute the good.
This chapter concerns a more general discussion of music’s relationship to ethics. Although the principles of traditional normative ethics are sometimes observable in musical interactions, evidence from the communities suggests that they have limited utility for describing the everyday experience of music as ethics. This is because they are optimized for individualistic action, whereas musical interactions emerge from a fundamentally relational ontology encouraging us to constantly shift between egocentric and non-egocentric perspectives. Concepts of situated reasoning and virtue better describe this dynamic. Finally, this chapter argues that the shared experience of music as ethics is uniquely relevant to responding to social crises in modern pluralistic societies because it affords opportunities to imagine new forms of the common good across social–cultural difference.
The introduction describes the author’s reflective experiences of music as ethics, first in Indonesia and later in his community in Virginia. It then outlines the timeline and location of the research for the book and describes the methodologies. Summaries of each chapter are presented, outlining the social scene, musical forms, and the role of music as ethics in each of the four communities. The introduction concludes with a brief summary of the main thesis of this book: Music’s complexity and semantic ambiguity affords our ability to experience it as ethics, and the emotions it evokes can motivate ethical lives, helping us speculate on new forms of the common good.
This chapter focuses on the experience of music (or “noise”) as ethics in terms of Richmond, Virginia’s Black/White racial divide, historically the most salient social divide in the city. Richmond was the capital of the confederacy, and following reconstruction a series of laws were passed to consolidate White power and protect the legacy of the “lost cause.” The methodology for this chapter largely shifts from qualitative ethnography to a more quantitative approach involving the visualization of large data sets and a shift of focus from individuals to institutions. How does access to music making and listening, and the right to make and be free from “noise,” express and reproduce Richmond’s ethical life? Whose sounds are celebrated? Whose sounds are muted? Who has a sonic “right to the city”? These questions concern the intersection of justice, equity, and distribution that has long been a central theme in Western moral theory.
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