Music making and the processes that involve it are the subject of a thematic project
In the Fapesp thematic project “O Musicar Local – new trails for ethnomusicology”, “musicar” is not a verb, but a substantiated verb that does not exist in the Portuguese dictionary and that sounds as strange as its original in English, “musicking”, equally invented. “It's a word coined by New Zealand musicologist Christopher Small, who wanted a more comprehensive term than making music that leads us to think about people performing and creating music”, says Suzel Ana Reily, professor at the Institute of Arts (IA) and coordinator of the project, whose team is made up of 46 professors, post-doctoral students, post-graduate students and scientific initiation students, based between Unicamp and USP.
For Suzel Reily, the invention of the word is justified because it is a new concept, following the notion that there are many forms of engagement besides making music. “If we think about the contemporary engagements of the general population, it is much more about listening to music, doing download, to create playlist for the cell phone. The idea is exactly to open up the scope of what is studied much more, even to better understand the process of making music. In all live music, for example, there are a lot of people involved who are not necessarily making music: the producer, the lighting designer, the studio staff, the photographer who documents the show.”
The IA professor clarifies that the “local music” of the project does not refer to a specific location, but to study how the location impacts the music making process and vice versa. “This becomes evident when we think about globalized forms, such as funk, which arrived from the United States and was adapted to Rio de Janeiro with other sounds, stage practices and instruments; and, in addition to funk from Rio, we have funk from Santos, funk from the outskirts of São Paulo. Likewise, every church has a choir and there are choirs all over the world. A musicology student will not focus on a neighborhood choir, a popular music student will not consider it as popular music, nor a folklorist as roots music, nor an ethnomusicologist as ethnic group music.”
With the concept of music making, observes Suzel Reily, a large gap opens up to study everyday, amateur musical practices that were not being considered by scholars. “Within the idea of local music, we can bring all these ways of making music into the scope of musicology. The original thematic project had just over 20 researchers and now there are 46, showing that we met an important demand for this topic, mainly at Unicamp and USP, but also from foreigners who joined the proposal and are participating in the team.”
The Fapesp theme coordinator explains that each researcher has their own particular project, all contemplating this relationship between music and location. “Some people are working with globalized traditions such as funk, others with amateur groups and others with traditional forms such as Afro-Brazilian, bands, choirs. The locations vary greatly, from indigenous villages, different scenes in São Paulo, an orchestra in the Northeast to a choir of gentlemen in France, who sang together in church as boys and recovered by creating an arena of sociability in their village.”
Suzel Reily also points to studies showing how music creates social environments in localities, promoting fraternization between people. “There is no wedding or party without music. We have musicians in bars, in churches, in processions, serving their communities. The project brings research focusing on professional musicians, who create an identity for the place, such as choro or jazz, or who, due to the lack of a specific audience, need to adapt with a repertoire of different genres. A Greek researcher, whose doctoral thesis was on Nigerian immigrant musicians in Athens, now observes this same community in Manchester and São Paulo. And I have my own research, focused on an early music movement that takes place in the state of São Paulo.”
collection
Results of this thematic project led by the teacher at IA have already been published in the collection The Routledge Companion to the Study of Local Musicking, which she organized together with the American ethnomusicologist Katherine Brucher – a partnership that had already resulted in a previous book, about bands: Brass Bands of the World: Militarism, Colonial Legacies and Local Music Making. "Routledge Companion is a series that this publisher produces, seeking new themes and bringing together up to 40 articles in each volume. Now the collection is linked to the Fapesp project, but I had already been working on it before coming to Unicamp, where I have only been since 2015. I spent 26 years in Northern Ireland; I initially went on a sandwich scholarship to Queen's University in Belfast and ended up being hired by the institution.”
Suzel Reily explains that the collection provides a conceptualization of local music and articles dealing with varied topics, such as the formation of local communities on the internet, where people from different parts of the world meet to listen to niche repertoires; the ritual of going to a popular music concert among young people in Greenland, which involves more than the repair itself (there is prior preparation and at the end of the concert the young people find themselves in a house for a party where they themselves sing a traditional repertoire) ; the services provided to the community by a Chicago radio station; and even the tensions reflected by music in certain locations. “For example, one article is about Northern Ireland, where music marks the distinction between Protestants and Catholics.”