Küçük, Parçalı ve Atomlaşmış Dünyanın Müzik Sosyolojisindeki Yeni Kavramları
Modernizm, postmodernizm ve küreselleşmenin önde gelen teorisyenleri, yirmi birinci yüzyıl dünyasının, birleştirici ve tektipleştirici güçler ile atomlaştırıcı, parçalayıcı ve bölük pörçükleştirici güçlerin, kendilerini ve birbirilerini gerçekleştirme mekanizmaları tarafından şekillendirildiğinde artık hemfikirler. Bu mutabakatın uzantılarını 1990’lardan itibaren müzik sosyolojisi literatüründe de gözlemlemek mümkündür. Öyle ki yirminci yüzyılın ilk yarısında standartlaşma, tektipleşme, endüstrileşme, ticarileşme gibi süreçlere yoğunlaşan ilgi, giderek daha fazla büyük resmin dışında kalan, parçalı, küçük ve yerel birimleri anlamaya yöneldi; böylece her biri farklı derecelerde parçalanmaya, ayrıksılaşmaya, kimi zaman da etkileşimle iç içe geçmeye işaret eden birimleri anlama çabasına dönük yeni kavram ve çerçeveler dolaşıma girdi. Bu makale küçük, parçalı ve atomlaşmış müzik yaşamı analizlerinde ağırlıklı olarak benimsenen sahne (scene), mikromüzikler (micromusics), music milieu ve minör müzik (musique mineure) gibi yeni kavram ve çerçevelerin kapsadıkları, dışladıkları ya da boş bıraktıkları alanları saptayarak müzik sosyolojisindeki kullanımlarını ele almakta; aynı zamanda evrimci biyoloji, ekoloji ve ekonomi çalışmalarında kullanılan niş (niche) kavramını müzik sosyolojisi çalışmaları için önererek küçük ve yerel birimlerin yorumlanmasına genişlik kazandırmayı amaçlamaktadır.
The New Concepts of the Little, Divided, and Atomized World in the Sociology of Music
Leading theoreticians of modernism, postmodernism, and globalism now agree that the 21st century world is being shaped by unifying and standardizing forces as well as atomizing, dividing, and fragmenting forces through their self-fulfilling mechanisms and awareness of each other. The traces of this agreement can also be found in the literature of music sociology since the 1990s. Indeed, the concentrated interest in the processes of standardization, industrialization, and commercialization during the first half of the 20th century has gradually shifted toward units that stay out of the big picture and are fragmented, small, and local. In an effort to understand such units, new concepts, and theoretical frameworks -each of which refers to fragmentation, differentiation, and sometimes intertwinement through interaction- have been brought into circulation. This article deals with new concepts and theoretical frameworks, such as scene, micromusics, music milieu, and musique mineure as they are found in the analyses of small, fragmented, and atomized musical life within music sociology literature. It aims to determine their scope and limits and also to expand the analysis of small and local units by exploring the concept of niche, which is used in evolutionary biology, ecology, and economy studies.
At the beginning of the 21st century, we witnessed how society was fragmented (Jenks, 2007), modern institutions were divided (Giddens, 2010a, 2010b), and nationstates transformed into archipelago-states composed of minorities and diasporas as a result of modern migration movements. We see blurred connections related to the formations of identity and belonging (Bauman, 2015), how organized modernity collapsed (Wagner, 2005), how global and local started to interact (Khonder, 2004; Robertson, 1995), and how this interaction gave birth to new spaces (Appadurai, 1996). This fragmented and atomized world found its place in the debates of modernism, postmodernism and globalism, and after a while, music sociology started to deal with musical activities, practices and tastes in various geographies within the context of their specific conditions and singularities. This shift of focus gave way to new concepts and theoretical frameworks in music sociology literature, such as music scenes (Cohen, 1999), micromusics (Slobin, 1992, 1993), music milieu (Webb, 2007), and musique mineure (Cler & Messina, 2007). There is no doubt that the appearance of new concepts and theoretical frameworks was supported by the criticism or even rejection of existing theoretical frameworks (Bennett, 2004, p. 223), and by the fact that they fell short of analyzing small and local units that were becoming more effective in musical life. On the other hand, by the 1990s the dynamics that shape cultural life had changed. The philanthrocapitalism model (Bishop & Green, 2009; Edwards, 2008) predicting a paradigm shift in sponsorship from state to private sector (Wu, 2005) was accepted and applied more widely. By the 2000s, it became obvious that cultural life at the beginning of the new century was oscillating between big corporations, business organizations, non-governmental organizations, independent organizations, and all kinds of micro organizations and communities; the need for new theoretical tools for analyzing this multi-dynamical system became more obvious than ever before. However, it should be noted that there is no single or centralized system that controls the cultural flow in the 21st century, as well as no single analytical system that can help comprehend this world (Slobin, 1992, pp. 1–5). Indeed, none of the above-mentioned concepts or frameworks claims to analyze the whole system or its parts; such a comprehensive analytical system does not appear possible anymore due to multiple singularities of small and local units. Therefore, the music sociology literature of the last two decades is full of new concepts and theoretical frameworks. Most of them are limited to a few studies; on the other hand, only a few of them are embraced and developed by different researchers. Although all of them agree on the priority and significance of ethnographic methods and in situ experiences to reveal singularities of small and local units, there seems to be no consensus on the definition of these units, or on how such a unit interacts with other units. Some of the researchers who use these concepts and frameworks took a city, a neighborhood, or a community that gathers in a certain venue as a small or local unit, and attempted to reveal its inner social, economic and industrial relationships; while others focused on the individual as the smallest unit or on the units that resisted industrial relations. It means that although these new concepts and theoretical frameworks grow out of a similar kind of objection to the existing frameworks, they inevitably separate from each other due to the difference in their analytical objects. For example, in the early 1990s, after academic studies adopted the concept of scene, which has been used by musicians and music journalists for a long time to describe a group of musicians, promoters, and fans that gather around particular music genres (Bennett, 2004, p. 223), it became a theoretical framework in global, mobile, and trans-local contexts with the studies of Sara Cohen (1991), Will Straw (1991), and Barry Shank (1994), and opened new methods for analyses of small and local units. Straw and Geoff Stahl used the concept this way: “scene memberships are not necessarily restricted according to class, gender or ethnicity, but may cut across all of these” and they “encompass a much more diverse range of sensibilities and practices than subculture” (Bennett, 2004, p. 225). However, as the concept was adopted by different researchers and used in studies on youth cultures and translocality, it lost its emphasis on single localities and local singularities, and became too fluid and flexible (Hesmondhalgh, 2005). Similar to the initial idea of the concept of scene, micromusics, termed by Mark Slobin, refers to the small musical units within big music-cultures, especially musics of communities shaped by deterritorialization (1992; 1993). Slobin points out that the tendencies, activities, and formations of migrant and diaspora communities do not only affect the community itself but also bigger populations in a broader sense (1991, p. 1), and thus create a diasporic interculture, on which the concept of scene stays silent. Slobin’s approach also emphasizes that without considering migrant and diaspora communities, the fragmented and atomized world cannot be fully understood. Another concept that both criticizes the concept of scene and offers an alternative to it is music milieu by Peter Webb. According to Webb, an individual’s lifeworld is composed of momentary milieu, which refers to a “relatively stable environment and disposition of the individual to the world,” and milieu structure, which refers to “the current and transitory content of the actual environment (…) through the individual’s order of values” (Webb, 2007, p. 31). Thus, he accentuates the individual, the individual’s choices, and the interaction between stable and temporary experiences. In this sense, his “small unit” is the individual, and the network around him is composed of various kinds of connections, relations, and collective activities. On the other hand, Jérôme Cler’s concept of musique mineure, borrowed from littérature mineure by Deleuze and Guattari, refers to the edges of the periphery and single practices within complicated structures; in other words, musique mineure is like sidetracks on which every kind of hegemonic mechanism is refused (2007). Nevertheless, Cler’s aim is not to offer an analytical model with this concept; on the contrary, it is to point to the fields ignored by both music sociology and ethnomusicology, to break down the dichotomy between global and local, and to show that cultural life is not only determined by global and local worlds or by their interaction. The concept of niche, which has long been used in evolutionary biology, ecology, and economics with respect to migration studies, focuses on the explanation of the change and transformation of an entity, and aims to offer an interactive concept for the entity-environment relationship. The “mixed embeddedness” approach of the concept is also useful to understand how migrant and diaspora communities become organized in particular ways and how they shape their cultural activities, since the approach focuses on the internal and external networks of the individual and its community, laws, regulations, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and on the effect of changing the habitat in which they live. In conclusion, it seems that music sociology, when it tries to understand a fragmented and atomized world, not only becomes richer in terms of concepts and theoretical frameworks, but also becomes more fragmented and atomized than ever before. Some new concepts and theoretical frameworks lose their sharpness when they are embraced and adopted by different researchers; nevertheless, each one of them consolidates the notion that the world in the 21st century is becoming more homogenous and standardized while it is fragmented and atomized at the same time.
