My Music: Explorations of Music in Daily Life

Foreword

G E O R G E L I P S I T Z Foreword A few years ago, a reporter for a national magazine asked the jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim to explain how he first became interested in music. Recognizing the question as a standard opening for interviews with performers, Ibrahim nonetheless refused to answer directly. Instead, he challenged the question’s premises in order to illumine an important difference between music making in the United States and in his native South Africa. "People always ask this question, you see, and I understand why [laughs], because here it seems as if it's a concerted effort which you have to go through when you're a child, that you have to start singing or start playing. In Africa, you're born into it. It's all part of the day-to-day living.”1 Ibrahim insisted upon representing music as a social rather than an individual activity.Where he grew up, music played a vital role in medicine , in religion, and in politics—not as an ornamentation or commentary on them, but as a vital and organic part of the practices themselves. Rephrasing the interviewer’s question, Ibrahim replied, "it's not when 7 started to play; music was there . . . you open up your eyes, it's in the home, in the community.”2 Ibrahim's insight illuminesan important aspect of music anywhere— its inescapable identity as a social practice. When you open up your eyes, it's there. Although Ibrahim delineates important differences between musical practices in South Africa and in North America, we arc helped by his formulation to notice an often ignored reality about music making in the United States and in all advanced industrialized countries. Here, too (in part because of the powerful African presence in all European and American popular music), musical practices do not “start” when we pick up an instrument or when we pay attention to what is happening in any given song. We enter a world of music already in progress Foreword / ix around us. No less than in Africa, we encounter musiceverywhere—at the schools and the symphony halls, in the churches and the taverns, on the radio and the television. Our musicalpractices do not blend life and art as thoroughly as they do in some parts of Africa, but they nonetheless function as nodes in a larger network, as complicated and diverse ways for people to reaffirm old identities and to forge new ones. Interesting in their own right as public expressions of things that are generally kept private, the interviews inMy Music provide some clues to more general questions about exactly how and why music plays such an important role in the modern world. They offer evidence and insights capable of adding significantly to the existing scholarly and popular literature about music by musicologists, journalists, and social scientists. Expert musicologists, journalists, and social scientists have written many important and interesting works about music, but only rarely have they confronted the complicated and contradictory ways that people use music to make meaning for themselves. In their accounts, musicologists tend to give greatest attention to the content of musical texts: the melodies, harmonies, and progressions that give determinate shape to the sounds that we hear as music. Journalists,on the other hand, almost never write about music itself; their concerns center on artists and audiences , on the personal histories of musicians and on the passions of their adoring fans. Social scientists, for their part, tend to downplay the importance of artists and audiences, focusing instead on the commercial and social apparatuses that promote, distribute, and regulate musical production and reception, especially institutions within the music industry , conservatories, critics, and government regulators and censors. Musicologists, journalists, and social scientists all illumine parts of the truth about music, but they have not as yet produced an adequate way of understanding (and theorizing) how interactionsamong the artists , audiences, and apparatuses collectivelycreate the world of musical production, distribution, and reception. We arc now at a moment when it is possible to think about music in important new ways. Before 1970, popular music criticism tended to revolve around anxiety about the effects of commercialism and mass marketing on music that originated in "folk" settings, like blues, jazz, and country. This period produced many brilliant works that remain essential to understanding music today. Americo Paredes’s brilliant analysis of the popularity of the "Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” among Chicanos in south Texas demonstrated how a song could...