Beginning in the late 1970s, ethnomusicologists began to engage with ideas from phenomenology (a movement within Continental European philosophy). This article discusses key concepts from phenomenology and explores how ethnomusicologists developed them to address fundamental issues in the study of music and culture—the problem of musical meaning and musical interpretation, the nature of the performance event, and questions of music and being. Tracing the intellectual history of phenomenological ethnomusicology, the article synthesizes findings from research on a broad range of musical traditions and offers new insights into a variety of topics of interest to contemporary music scholars, including embodiment, self-reflexivity, flow and musical involvement, trance, time and temporality, research methods, and the politics of music. The article closes by discussing the explosion of phenomenological work in ethnomusicology that has occurred in recent years and suggests new directions for research.
This article explores how two groups of American popular musicians have engaged with sound reproduction technologies—country artists and radio in the 1920s–40s and hip-hop DJs and video since 2000—to create an unintended but lasting cultural heritage for their musical traditions. Neither the radio broadcasts made by country artists nor the amateur videos of DJs were intended to be permanent. We argue that the practitioners of these traditions have acted as accidental archivists—shaping the development of their respective genres in the process of preserving them—and suggest how these archives may be of use to public historians.
In 1987, Tony Melendez—a guitarist born without arms who plays the instrument with his feet—played at a youth rally for Pope John Paul II. Immediately after his performance, the Pope kissed Melendez and instructed him to continue “giving hope” through his music. Although the guitar accompaniment of confessional, singer-songwriter music is rarely considered virtuosic, Tony Melendez's bodily difference makes his ability to sonically pass as what he calls a “common player” an impactful display of skill for his audiences. Because Melendez's body is treated as simultaneously virtuosic and disabled, his example foregrounds the social construction of both categories and challenges the tendency to isolate either in the individual body. Rather than suggesting a sort of qualified approach to “disabled” virtuosity, this article argues that there is no such thing as unqualified virtuosity. The presumed limitations and possibilities of bodies, instruments, and repertoires always inform our understandings of skill, but we are not always explicitly aware of them. Through interviews and analysis of his performances and their media representations, I show how bodily difference and the complex subject positions of both performers and audiences contribute to what counts as skill, creative labor, and agency within a particular context.
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