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Music as Ethics offers a comparative ethnography of four musical communities in Virginia: a monastery, an intentional community, the Richmond city jail, and the city of Richmond, VA. While music's relationship to ethical life differs between each community, ethnographic research suggests that music can serve as a means to a more ethical lifestyle.
Sommario
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: Conceptual Frame
- Chapter 2: Holy Cross Monastery
- Chapter 3: Twin Oaks Intentional Community
- Chapter 4: Richmond Jail
- Chapter 5: Richmond City
- Chapter 6: Conclusion: Music as Ethics
- Notes
- References
- Index
Info autore
Andrew McGraw is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Richmond in Virginia. He has published extensively on music in Southeast Asia, music and ethics, and temporality in Balinese, Javanese, and Cuban musics. In Richmond he facilitates community gamelan and stringband ensembles and a music program in the city jail.
Riassunto
Music as Ethics offers a comparative ethnography of the relationship of music to ethics in four communities in Virginia, covering a wide range of demographic contexts and musical repertoires. Holy Cross Monastery in Berryville is a small community of fifteen Trappist monks who follow the rule of St. Benedict, composed in the early sixth century. Twin Oaks in Louisa is a ninety-member intentional community, founded in 1967, dedicated to egalitarianism. The "Sanctuary" in the Richmond city jail is a community of approximately forty residents drawn from two of the facility's dorms. Richmond is the state capital, with a fraught history of racial inequality. To say that we can experience music "as" ethics means that we can hold several, culturally informed attitudes about music's ethical meanings and functions. While music's relationship to ethical life differs between each community, the case studies suggest that we can all grow as ethical individuals and communities if we pay close attention to music's ethical potential. But as long as our experience of music as ethics remains implicit and vague, we miss an opportunity to fully realize its ethical affordances. More than that, we also expose ourselves to manipulation by those who would wield music (and other "affective" means) for their own social agenda.
