Soundscapes and Music Theory
Theories of sound and music in urban space provide a useful framework for this study. Building on the work of R. Murray Schafer (1994), different authors have imagined the city as a soundscape. Unlike “hi-fi” rural soundscapes where listeners can focus fully on each discrete aural element, the city, Schafer argues, is a “lo-fi” soundscape where different and often dissonant outputs compete ad nauseam for our attention. While much of the literature on city soundscapes relates to environmental sounds, a segment of this work also concentrates on music. The concept of the “musical city” is taken up by urban planners like Sara Adhitya (2017), who asks to attend to the general urban rhythms of population and capital flows based on the rhythmanalysis of Henri Lefebvre (2004). Geographer Paul Rodaway (1994) has also analyzed this sonic field in terms of the dynamic acoustic space building further upon “hi-fi” and “lo-fi” soundscapes of Schafer. My own work follows this approach distinguishing between the basic attention-attracting signals, soundmarks, sound objects, and sound events.[1]
Schafer and subsequent critics (Schafer 1994: 65-67; Garrioch 2003) also note the official expulsion of unwanted sounds from European cities including the repression of street music during nineteenth-century modernization. Vienna, often depicted as one of the belle époque capitals (Pollak 1997; Schorske 1979), with its dominant highbrow cultural traditions, still epitomizes the carefully controlled bourgeois city. The often libidinal and seemingly uncontainable sounds of the Balkans may seem out of place in this context, a mismatch that may lead to misunderstandings, if not anxiety and distress (Bjelić 2011). On the other hand, the work of music historian Ewa Mazierska (2019) on one tiny strand of the Viennese soundscape (electronic popular music at the turn of the millennium) points to the extraordinary openness and inclusivity of the city’s public sphere. In fact, she argues, the broad range of original sonic experiences on offer included something for every taste.
In terms of general theoretical approaches, this study explores the significance of the musical layers of distinct soundscapes. As critical literature on the role of music in society is particularly rich, I am only able to highlight a few of the key approaches that inform my analysis. To begin with, as Dick Hebdige (1979) has shown, attending to the ethnic aspects of music subcultures can illuminate broader hegemonic power struggles. In this study, these may include the conflicts between young people from former Yugoslavia and those from other migrant or local backgrounds in urban communities. Turkish, Arabic, Romanian, Polish or Chechen music subcultures and their local counterparts like the “Krocha” (Ikrath 2008) are all important reference points for this cultural studies-inspired research into music communities from former Yugoslavia in Vienna.
A pessimistic picture emerges from Theodor Adorno’s (1991) work, which highlights standardization as the ultimate logic of cultural imperialism. Music is undoubtedly commodified by capitalism and, as Adam Krims writes, even in the post-Fordist era,“[o]ne of the hallmarks of flexible accumulation remains its stunningly successful deployment of subaltern subjects, both for new forms of labor like back-office organization and for low-level services” (Krims 2007: 125-126). Members of the former Yugoslav migrant workforce often perform low-status labor in exploitative conditions. Clearly their musical experiences must be considered in the context of their role in capitalist modes of production.
Finally, following Pierre Bourdieu (1979), distinct musical tastes can be likened to tastes in any other cultural field: they reflect status inequalities based on their bearer’s socio-economic position, education, and networks. One large-scale study in the United Kingdom (Bennett et al. 2009: 75-92) defended this model against critiques drawn from US research in the 1980s (Peterson and Kern 1996). The upper classes, the UK researchers found, were not omnivorous music consumers as the US study had claimed. Rather, music was a contested cultural field where certain borders would not be crossed. The earlier research, they concluded, had not considered enough indicators of musical taste or highbrow style and had analyzed too few musical genres. The renaissance of Bourdieu-inspired cultural sociology continued in 2010s with cultural position defined as an intersection of different positions defined by the lack or abundance of either economic, social or cultural capital (Savage 2015).
In these processes of taste-based class formation, gender and age could be added as two variables meriting further attention. Without neglecting the importance of the first, here I aim to focus on age. The concept of age and particularly the focus on youth was a crucial research axis already for the studies on music subcultures (Jefferson and Hall 1976). Moreover, here I consider the concept of ageing as linked to specific cultural practices, many of which having not only important musical but also sonic dimensions.