Anyone who has read Moving Away From Silence (Reference Turino1993), Thomas Turino's seminal ethnography on the pervasive effects of migration on Andean people and their musical traditions, will be aware of the sensitive nature of his thinking and how he fuses research and theory. His book Nationalists, Cosmopolitans and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (Reference Turino2000) explored the role of music in African nationalism through examining the emergence of cosmopolitan culture among the black middle class. The strength of Turino's new book comes from distilled reflection on the role of critical synthetic thinking while teaching ‘Introduction to World Music’ and other courses over a long period in a US public university. It's an illuminating book which will surely find its way onto the bibliographies of popular music courses. Drawing from the collective work of ethnomusicologists, anthropologists and social theorists as well as extensive fieldwork in Peru, Zimbabwe and the United States, Turino has written a very personal, accessible and profoundly ambitious text based on the question, ‘What do I want people to consider about the nature of musical meaning and the crucial role music plays in social, spiritual and political life?’ In answering this he provides a challenging read based on constant analysis rather than argument forcing any reader bringing their own trajectory to the process into a similar position of re-thinking.
In eight well-organised, neatly subdivided chapters, Turino fully explores a diversity of subjects, laying out his perspective in the introductory first chapter, ‘Why Music Matters’, which grooves the whole in the underlying fundamental psychological premise that musical participation and experience are valuable for the processes of personal and social integration that make us whole. By dynamically relating Gregory Bateson's writing on artistic creativity to Peircean semiotics as a way into understanding the complex ways music and dance create and communicate emotion and meaning through iconic signs and processes, indexical connections and symbols, Turino sets out the ground for what he considers the crucial interplay between ‘the Possible’ and ‘the Actual’ using Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's concept of ‘optimal experience’ within the ‘flow’ of social life, to help explain how art and music aid individuals in reaching fuller integration of the self through involvement with artistic processes (p. 4).
These theoretical arguments are persuasively embedded within cogent analysis of the personal experience of music making, ethnographic research, teaching and daily living. Explanations are highly detailed and fleshed out by everyday music-making examples. In chapters 2 and 3, Turino outlines four distinct fields of music making as a way of breaking up the notion of ‘music’ as a unitary form: chapter 2 focuses on real-time performance, on ‘participatory’ and ‘presentational’ music making; chapter 3 examines the making of recorded music as both ‘high fidelity music’ and ‘studio audio art’. In chapter 4, Turino outlines a series of models for thinking about individual subjectivity, identity and the dynamics of cultural difference as they intersect with musical practices. Chapters 5 and 6 use case studies to elaborate on a distinction between ‘cultural formations’ and ‘cultural cohorts’, using the latter to designate particular interest and identity groups existing within broader cultural formations, illustrated by vivid exploration of participatory performance in Zimbabwe and US old time music and dance. Chapter 7 compares the semiotics of musical signs within two political movements: Nazi Germany and the US Civil Rights movement. Then finally in chapter 8, Turino brings his arguments to conclusion by suggesting participatory music making as an experiential model for fashioning alternative social futures and richer individual lives.
In a sense, each chapter could be compared to a complex tapestry which from a distance attracts through invigorating splashes of deep colour while close up reveal themselves as made up not of single colours nor even layers of the same colour, but instead are the sum of subtly and finely graded shades. In that sense, one is drawn back continually to re-consider and re-map. Near the end of the book, Turino describes the response of business school undergraduates to a talk he gave about the very different ways people conceive of the world, of diversified habits of thought and practice shared among different groups of people, thereby breaking down the notion and assumptions of ‘global culture and any natural associations with the spreading of capitalism’ (p. 226). Reflecting on his later response to their very real questions about music in their own lives, he realises he is involved in explicating why being involved in music making involves the salutary internalisation of the different value systems, priorities and habits that underlie styles of music making and styles of life. It is not only the potential of participatory performance – for social bonding, integration of individual selves, for imagining the possible, for experiencing the actual and for flow are available to anyone though a wide range of activities – that he is exploring. ‘It is not playing the mbira or panpipes or banjo that makes the difference; it is the whys and hows, the values and practices underpinning alternative modes of performance that are of importance for devotees and “multicultural educators” to understand, experience and teach’ (p. 227).
Ultimately, the sub-text here is a critique of late capitalist economics and cultural value. It is a re-affirmation not only of the power of music as a social force and as a key resource for transforming subjectivities, and of the ethos that ‘small is still beautiful’, but of the pluralism of small cultural group activity (cultural cohorts) and the efficacy of cultural networks in forging new cultural formations for social and ecological survival. Turino cites the Andean saying ‘If you do not give to the earth she will not give to you’ (p. 232). As we end the first decade of the twenty-first century in a disparate world of expanding urbanism where the media, governments, financial institutions and corporations have been mutually feeding off each other inspired by ruthless ideologies of power and greed, this book in a sense is a plea for living the world through music in alternative ways, and thereby is itself, for this reader at least, of enormous value.
