Understanding Music Scene through Art World and Field

57 2006, p. 372) but rather to understand which are the consequences of some theoretical stances, not only on art world and field perspectives but even their influences upon the scene perspective.

3.5 Understanding Music Scene through Art World and

58 Becker’s approach is aimed at describing how collaborative activities would perfectly produce together a work of art, by sharing common conventions which are understood as a means of organizing coordinated activities rather than creating symbolic meanings.

However from Becker, it’s not clear how people cooperating to produce a work of art come together and how the selection of these people happens, and which are the power relations and hierarchy existing.

Bourdieu instead enables to understand how there is symbolic legitimization, that people struggle for, to achieve a position within the field of cultural (music) production. In Bourdieu the struggle among the agents has much more a symbolical role of being legitimized within the field than a practical mean in the creation of a work of art in Becker’s perspective.

Becker’s study enables to consider a phenomenological level of inquiry which looks at the practices and collaborations of individuals, and which emphasizes the importance of subjective understanding of art and art world. Becker’s model of conventions is useful to describe how the coordination of art world activity is enabled through narratives and rules shared by the actors in the art world.

However as Bourdieu suggests in his critic to Becker’s definition of art world (and as we could find in the definition of scene) there’s a reduction of the concept to the sum of people and interactions that constitute it, and which exists because of the recognition by its members.

For Becker: “art world consist of all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world and perhaps others as well define as art” (1982, p. 34).

Bourdieu, suggesting that this level of inquiry is not sufficient for the social theory, enables to assess the usefulness of taking into account a more sophisticated and structured theoretical model which is the product of the researcher’s abstraction rather than reducing a model to a fairly descriptive analysis of cultural practices, that doesn’t allow to address broader issues and that risk to be flattened the perspective in the common sense discourses.

In both art world and music scene, we can often find reference to the need of distancing these notions from their vernacular use in order to legitimize the relevance as theoretical perspectives. As for example Becker states: “Art world is commonly used by writers in the arts in a loose and metaphoric way … I use the term in a more technical way…”(Becker, 1982, p. X).

We don’t instead find in Bourdieu reference to the need of distancing from the common sense understanding of the word ‘field’ because there is much more sophisticated theorization with

59 a different level of abstraction in Bourdieu that we can’t find in descriptive and tautological definitions of the art world and in the music scene approaches.

To say it briefly, if there’s no claim to provide a structured theoretical model, the risk remains of flattening the perspective only to the meaning of the word (i.e. scene or art world) and of confusing the notion with its common sense meaning.

The problem in having a term which is highly dependent upon its common sense discourses, it’s that its development will depend upon its common sense representations and upon the awareness of its members which identify themselves as being part of a music scene or of an art world.

This is particularly true in the case of the music scene perspective which has been adopted by musicians, music journalists and policy makers and it’s now difficult to separate their rhetoric around the existence of a music scene and the critical perspective as a way of understanding music formations.

If in the music scene under study there is a sense of belonging to a scene, a city marketing strategy promoting the music scene and an infrastructure supporting the scene, this can work perfectly but what happen if, as in my research, there’s no a sense of belonging to a scene and a representation of the scene?

The problem of the art world and of the scene perspectives is that these concepts exist just because of the existence in the discourses of their members, flattening to a fairly descriptive meaning, which doesn’t allow to consider different layers of analysis.

That’s what we can find in Finnegan’s approach to music worlds in which she adopts the term referring to the common sense understandings among the members, but she then realizes that the symbolic representation and distinction between different musical worlds is not able to encapsulate the complexities of music-making practices. Therefore she adopts the term pathways which enables to study individual trajectories which transcend musical worlds.

Similarly but from different perspectives, both in Kruse and Webb’s adoptions of Bourdieu’s notion of field there is a need to have multi-layered theorization which enables to include the abstract level of the field together with the considerations of individual actions and interactions, and subjective representations. For Webb there has to be a more phenomenological level constituted by the milieu which ‘illuminates the notion of a network that has a particular density in terms of connections, relevancies, typifications, commonalities, and aesthetics’ (Webb 2007: 30), to which he adds the theorization of the field. And at the same time for Kruse local and inter-local practices need to be understood within a set of

60 political, economic, social and cultural relation that constitute the present conjuncture, by using the lens of Boudieu’s field of practice.

Taking into account these perspective, I argue that there have to be two layers of analysis: one referring to the networks of people activities and another referring to the theoretical construct of the researcher which need to be used at a level of abstraction.

Bourdieu’s conceptualization enables to consider this level of abstraction which is constituted by the field and by its interconnectedness with different fields and of the objective relations.

However Bourdieu’s relational theory doesn’t allow to consider the interconnectedness of concrete interactions in the different fields.

There has instead to be a recognition of the importance that situated interactions play together with a recognition of the role that power relations and structural constraints can play in affecting these situated interactions. The recognition of the importance of situated interactions is central to Becker’s interactionist perspective, but art world doesn’t provide a way of understanding these interactions more than in the descriptions and symbolic representations of its members. That’s why I will not point out the importance of using the notion of network as a way of theoretically understanding concrete interactions.