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4 Local Music A Tonic for the Troops? P revious chapters described music and musicians who have influenced people across the globe and nation. But what are the rest of us to do? What about local music, the kind that anyone can make? Theoretically , this is where music matters most, at least from an ecological perspective . It is where we live. Local music connects local people to local places, places in need of protection and stewardship. Music coheres and enlivens face-to-face communities , and it can inspire a shared sense of stewardship. There are countless ethnographic examples of music connecting small-scale communities to the world of life around them. Rather than an aberration, it has been universal practice for bands, tribes, and villagers to use musical rites to understand and venerate their surrounding environment. The situation is more complicated in large, hierarchical, and socially complex societies. Theoretically, local communities and subcultures could still experience a deep orientation to place, but empirically that is not the case for many people. Therefore, renewing community connections to local place is essential if our lives and societies are to become more sustainable. That is more easily said than done. As an ethnographer and ecomusicologist , I have just started to discover the sorts of profound and hopeful examples I had initially imagined and set out to find. I thought that community would simply spring forth as a result of shared musical activity in the local area. But it was not that simple. Like all worthwhile endeavors, it has taken a great deal of work to cultivate ecologically meaningful musical relationships within the local community. 130 Chapter 4 The starting premise for this fieldwork was simple: make music with friends, family, and neighbors in order to foster a stronger sense of community (Mattern 1998, 9–23). Nothing terribly new or uncommon there. An additional goal took the experiment into fairly new territory for ethnographic fieldwork: to make music that might encourage environmental stewardship. I was never so naïve as to believe that music would magically inspire audiences to action. The act of making music does not, by itself, make us more environmentally aware or active. If that were the case, the problem would be solved. Music does not automatically set the world right, no matter how it is performed. Making music matter requires a great deal of individual and collective effort in addition to art. Nor is music necessarily a social good. In fact, becoming a truly accomplished musician requires one to be somewhat selfish, to engage in an obsessive, all-consuming neglect of other social activities and people. That includes taking time away from family and friends in order to make music, at least in the learning stage. That is why musicians typically do not make the best models for creating more sustainable lifeways. The field research began with another basic premise: anyone can make music, and more people should be doing so. People should be getting together in backyards, parks, and dumpsites, and not just to remove invasive species, restore streams, and educate students. Hard work is not enough to sustain a community or a biodiverse environment. People should be doing pleasurable, cultural labor as well, educating each other, celebrating the landscape, and building sustainable communities. Music is clearly an essential part of that, and anyone can do it. “Anyone” includes me. If we—musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and ecomusicologists— keep asking others to make music that builds communities and sustain ecologies, we should see how that actually works first hand. Physicians, heal thyselves. Granted, there is also value in writing about music, or no one would write books about music or read them. Not everyone needs to be making music all the time for music to matter. However, the musicological literature places a high value on musical participation. We tend to think that more people should make music, because when they do, good things happen. That is part of the premise here: that if more people made music in, and about, cherished and threatened local places, there would be a strong ecological net benefit. With that in mind, I decided to learn what it would take for the average person, an anthropologist, to just go out and start making environmental music. If not, I would at least Local Music 131 learn something from musical failure. Either way, I would learn. That is what ethnographers do. Therefore, I became a musician. That differentiates this study from most. “Within cultural and media studies the...

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