Since the early 1990s, the concept of scene has gathered critical momentum as a means of studying the intersection of music and everyday life. A centrally important feature of scene theory has been its rejection of purely structural accounts of musical taste and a move away from associated conceptual frameworks such as ‘subculture’ and ‘community’. In its conceptual transgression, scene has also contributed to the recasting of collective musical participation as something that can transcend the physical parameters of space and place to take on more affective and trans-local qualities (Straw 1991; Bennett and Peterson 2004). Similarly, with the emergence and increasing sophistication of digital media, there has been a growing acknowledgement in academic work on scenes of the potential for ‘virtual’ forms of scene activity, either as distinctive practices or interlaced with more traditional forms of face-to-face interaction (Bennett 2002; Lee and Peterson 2004). The focus on scenes in the present has ultimately led to a broadening of the scenes perspective to consider the historical and trans-temporal dimensions of music scenes. Important points of departure here have been emergent literatures on music and ageing (see, for example, Bennett 2013) and music and heritage (see, for example, Cohen et al. 2015). Between them, these literatures have illustrated the extent to which the popular music culture of the last 60 years has shaped generational identity and memory.
The focus on memory in academic scholarship has its own long and established tradition, including work that examines memory as a collective and socially embedded entity (Olick and Robbins 1998; Roediger and Wertsch 2008). In more recent times, such interest in the collective properties of memory has been granted a significantly expanded presence through the emergence of what is now referred to as ‘cultural memory’ studies (see Erll and Nünning 2008). Rooted in a concern with textual and audio-visual representations of the recent and popular past, cultural memory studies has begun to map the ways in which such representations serve to shape broader, everyday understandings of how national and global historical legacies shape cultural identities in the present. A critical shift in this respect, and one that gives the past a more ‘popular’ and omnipresent quality, is its highly mediated nature. Through their continuous pattern of encounter with mediations of the past – be these filmic, televisual, musical or ‘virtual’ – individuals in contemporary society are perpetually in the process of remembering, and in the reflexive organization and articulation of their memories, in the present. The contributions of cultural memory studies to interpretations of contemporary cultural life can thus be aligned with the ‘cultural turn’, which places emphasis on the reconceptualization of culture as a dynamic terrain of everyday life co-produced through the tensions between structure and agency (Chaney 1994; see also Chap. 2). From the point of view of cultural memory theorists, the production of cultural memory emerges from a complex interplay between individuals and the everyday consumption of objects, images and texts that serve to present ideas about the past and its bearing on the present.
The purpose of this book is to engage in an initial attempt to bring together elements of scene theory and cultural memory studies in order to offer a new way of thinking about and theorizing music scenes as cultural spaces in which the past and present remain aesthetically linked. The central premise of this book is that, through utilizing more recently introduced concepts such as cultural memory and emotional geography (Davidson et al. 2007) in research on music scenes, we can facilitate a deeper understanding of the significance of scenes as cultural spaces of collective participation and belonging. Scene activity, we argue, may take a variety of forms, from regular attendance at gigs through to more individualized modes of listening to music in both public and private space, through the collection and archiving of live footage and other artefacts, to the organization of small-scale concerts in unofficial DIY (do-it-yourself) venue spaces. What often links such diverse practices together, however, is an affective sense of oneself as a part of something that is alive – both in a physical and temporal sense – and woven into the cultural landscape. This sense of belonging may manifest itself in both tangible and intangible (almost entirely affective) ways, but retains critical currency as a means through which the personal taste biographies of the many become clustered around those nodal points of collective musical life that denote scenes.
The findings of the book are based on extensive interviews with people involved in music at all levels – as fans, musicians, writers, producers, promoters, or various combinations of these things – across seven Australian cities: Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. Overall, a total of 89 people between the ages of 18 and 70 were interviewed: 66 males and 23 females. For the most part, the interviewees had either been born in Australia or had spent a significant part of their lives there. Similarly, although most of the interviewees were, at the time of interview, residents of the above-named cities, a number had moved there from smaller regional towns across Australia. While the stories that our interviewees tell are obviously grounded in their experience of music scenes based in Australian cities, many of the broader themes and issues upon which the interviews touched have a broader and more universal currency. As such, what we relate here – both in terms of the personal accounts of interviewees and our analysis of these accounts – is applicable to many other music scenes and music scene participants elsewhere in the world. The empirical research informing this book was funded by an Australian Research Council grant, and the empirical data were collected between 2011 and 2014. The research received ethical clearance from Griffith University (where the project was based) and was conducted in accordance with the policies and procedures established by Griffith University’s Research Ethics and Integrity Team and the Office for Research.
The book is divided into two parts. Part I (Chaps. 2 and 3) establishes the conceptual parameters of the book, while Part II (Chaps. 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8) offers a series of five themed empirical case studies.
In Chap. 2, we present an overview of the existing work on the concept of scene. Unsurprisingly, perhaps – given its pivotal role in establishing scene as a conceptual framework in academic research on popular music – considerable space in Chap. 2 is devoted to Straw’s (1991) pioneering article ‘Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change’ (originally published in the journal Cultural Studies). Although this article has been cited widely over the years, we argue that most of the attention has been given to Straw’s spatial conceptualization of scene, while his concept of articulation has received less attention and scrutiny than it has deserved. In taking up this matter, we suggest that, in the context of a study such as our own, where scene is being discussed largely as an object of memory, emotion and affect, the notion of articulation is critically important to our understanding of the collective dynamics of scene and scene association. In the remainder of Chap. 2, we consider work on scenes that appeared after Straw’s original account was published and explore how this draws on the ideas presented in Straw’s article to expand our understanding of and capacity to conceptualize scene as connoting forms of collective musical practice.
Chapter 3 extends our argument regarding the need for greater attention to the role of articulation in music scenes. Core to the discussion presented in this chapter is the suggestion that an engagement with issues of memory, emotion and affect is a necessary innovation in research on music scenes. Our reasoning in making this assertion is that current renderings of scene, which are more squarely focused on the spatial dynamics of scenes and/or their positing as, or within, nodes of cultural production, offer only a limited understanding of music scenes as cultural spaces that tie people together in meaningful relationships. Indeed, we suggest that, in order to fully understand the importance of scenes in this respect, we need to regard them as dynamic entities existing over time and serving as a means by which individuals build and articulate shared investments in music, both spatially and temporally. As part of the conceptual innovation that we propose in scene theory, we utilize cultural memory as a means of achieving a new emphasis on the spatio-temporal qualities of scene. As part of this process, we argue for a refinement of the cultural memory approach that assigns back to the individual a greater level of agency in forging musical meanings – one that accounts for the nuances and specificities of place, and the influence of these on individual and collective memory.
Chapter 4 turns its attention to an issue that is fundamentally at the heart of all accounts of music, memory and association with music scenes: the acquisition of musical taste. In interviewing our participants, the complex, shifting and contingent qualities of taste were acknowledged as an inevitable underpinning of taste biographies. Through posing questions that allowed for the exploration of the origins of taste biographies in this way, the accounts offered by interviews provided a graphic illustration of the intricate weaving between musical taste, memory and emotion. Although the musical tastes of many of our interviewees had shifted, or at least broadened, over the years, their earliest recollection of hearing music – typically that listened to by parents or older siblings – provided a basis for their evolving understanding of music as a barometer of emotional attachment, biographical development and personal reflection. As the comments of our interviewees show, taste stories remain important for individuals as they articulate their support for particular artists, particular genres of music and their concomitant association with particular scenes, both as past and present entities.
Chapter 5 focuses on the theme of the spaces of music consumption. As previously noted, it is our contention that, through redefining scenes as entities that are both spatial and temporal, inscribed with memory and emotion and affect, we are able to recast scenes as multispatialized. This chapter therefore moves beyond a straightforward analysis of scenes as clustered around clubs and venues (although these are certainly a dimension of what we focus on here) to engage with other, less commonly acknowledged and, at some level, less tangible spaces of scene engagement. Thus, in this chapter, we also consider how other hard infrastructure (Stahl 2004) aspects of scenes, notably venues and local record stores, serve as important (and in some cases iconic) markers of scenes, both in the past and the present. Indeed, one salient feature of the accounts provided by interviewees, in this chapter, is the way in which their sense of scene and its location in space is often presented as a back-and-forth narrative in which the venues, clubs, record shops and other meeting places of yesterday continue to inform a sense of scene in the present. In this sense, memory traces provide an important key to the emotional mapping that people bring to bear when negotiating cities in flux, where the spaces and places of musical encounters are in a constant state of decline and rebirth. The final section of this chapter takes another step into uncharted territories of scene theory by considering how musical participation in the private space of the home offers possibilities for more affective and intangible articulations of scene association, akin to those described by Bennett (2013) in his account of affective scene membership.
Chapter 6 offers an in-depth account of two instances of music production in Brisbane, the capital of the state of Queensland and Australia’s third-largest city. In keeping with the exploratory nature of this book, we take the view that music production, the spaces within which this takes place and its connection to scene can assume a multifarious character. In the first of the two case studies presented in this chapter, we consider an example of a local scene member with a broad and primarily DIY portfolio of activities, including studio production work, promotion and sound-mixing. This approach to music production, including the use of one’s own home as base for operations to save on costs, is becoming increasingly commonplace in what Smith and Maughan (1998) have referred to as the contemporary post-Fordist music industry. As this chapter illustrates, in addition to providing infrastructure for the perpetuation of scene activity, this DIY ethos and approach are also spreading outwards to inform the ways in which scenes are being documented and archived. The second case study examines a scene member’s attempts to record and preserve live music performances in Brisbane’s alternative and independent music scenes using hand-held recording equipment.
Chapter 7 focuses on the topic of cultural archiving and retrieval, and examines this as a localized form of DIY practice spanning both the pre- and post-digital era. With the emergence of the internet and later innovations associated with Web 2.0, such as facebook, the possibilities for virtual connection between participants have become more apparent. As this chapter illustrates, however, the foundations for such forms of co...