The concept of community is a longstanding concern in ethnographic music scholarship. From early song collectors who conceptualized communal song creation to more recent theories of musical agency in the active construction of human groups, ethnomusicologists and their kin have theorized a range of types of relationships between communities and music.
Music Making Community, edited by Tony Perman and Stefan Fiol, pulls together a community of ethnomusicologists whose commonalities include not just a professional interest in connections between music and community, but also fondness for University of Illinois Professor Emeritus of Ethnomusicology Thomas Turino. While not explicitly framed as such, this volume effectively serves as a festschrift in Turino’s honor. The authors of Music Making Community include many of Turino’s former students in the graduate program at Illinois, former UI colleagues, and others. In typical festschrift fashion, each of the volume’s authors places Turino’s ideas at the center of their analysis, and in many cases build on those ideas.
The book opens with a warm prologue by Turino’s former UI colleague, the late Bruno Nettl. Nettl succinctly summarizes four “areas of scholarship” that have preoccupied Turino during his career: 1) Peircean semiotics; 2) first two, then four, “fields” of music making (participatory, presentational, high fidelity, and studio audio art); 3) insistence on a critical theoretical approach; and 4) the necessity of participating in music making as part of music research methodology. Nettl then closes with a humorous verse he wrote for Turino’s retirement party—a playful representation of Turino’s career and Nettl’s fondness for his colleague and friend.
Fiol’s and Perman’s “Introduction: Music Making (and Unmaking) Community” follows, laying out the theoretical groundwork and structure of the volume. Key to their framing is their definition of community as “the composite relations grounded in similarity and difference among agents who act on their interdependence or mutual indebtedness” (8). Almost more a verb than a noun in this formulation, community happens via communication and action. Over time, these actions become habitual and develop a sense of identifiable interdependence and indebtedness that becomes a community. Music, they argue, “is social life” (7), and the social is comprised of relations that are dialectically shaped by musicking. That music makes community is not a given; indeed, while “music can generate new relations,” it can also “sever existing ones and reinforce old divisions” (7).
Considerable space in the introduction is devoted to positioning this volume as one in pursuit of “a more equitable and decolonial vision for ethnomusicology” (13). Acknowledging ethnomusicology’s undeniable colonialist history, dominated by white scholars from the Global North studying communities of color (16), Fiol and Perman prescribe a vision that, while not necessarily new, endeavors to build on Turino’s thinking to chart an ethical and effective path forward. The authors then describe Turino’s extension of Peirce’s habit-oriented understanding of identity from the individual to the group, through which he developed the concepts of cultural cohorts—groups that have only partial sets of shared habits—and cultural formations, those groups that have more comprehensive sets of shared habits. These formulations of community are widely adopted by the authors of this book’s chapters.
The main body of Music Making Community is structured in three parts. Part I, with chapters by Ioannis Tsekouras, Donna Buchanan, Eduardo Herrera, and Veit Erlmann, “emphasizes processes of differentiation and the resulting consequences of variable interpretations of sameness and difference” (9). Tsekouras opens Part I with a critical analysis of how the term “community” has been constructed historically and in more recent times in ethnomusicology and more broadly in social scientific research. He notes that, in recent decades, scholars have critiqued older models, originating with Durkheim, that seemed to take the concept of community for granted as both “factual and good” (37). Tsekouras offers his ethnographic research of the Pontic Greek performance genre (parakathi or muhabeti) as a case study of musicking that, while valued by communities, is not a means of community formation, according to its practitioners. Buchanan’s chapter addresses community formation in diaspora. Drawing on diaspora theorist Khachig Toloyan, Buchanan examines the ways that wedding performance among Bulgarian Armenians in diaspora “engenders the community’s intricate internal dynamics and nurtures a unifying ‘diasporic discourse’ of Armenian subjectivity in the face of potentially divisive forces” (65). Focusing on individual agents, Buchanan investigates how diasporic movement and its attendant social transformations are “performatively rendered in musical practice” (68). Relying on a multifaceted methodology including participating in an Armenian dance troupe, Buchanan demonstrates various ways in which shared and yet subjectively distinct notions of Armenian identity are constituted in performance.
Herrera investigates the use of chants at soccer matches in Argentina as affective sites for the “grounding” of community at the neighborhood level. Herrera argues that soccer fandom operates more as an affinity group—one founded on shared fandom for particular teams—than as an identity group. Herrera notes that Club Atlético Atlanta, a team from the neighborhood of Villa Crespo in Buenos Aires, reflects in its personnel the strong association of Jewishness with the neighborhood. Villa Crespo fans’ Jewish identity is constructed as much via chants levied at Club Atlético Atlanta as it is via chants by the team’s fans themselves. Herrera effectively portrays the ingroup/outgroup nature of these social interactions—the sonic, dialogic construction of community identity. By including in his argument chillingly antisemitic chants, Herrera’s essay reminds us that music’s power to create community can be manipulated for social ills just as effectively as for social good. Erlmann’s analysis questions the a priori existence of Indigenous communities prior to the creation of intellectual property laws to protect those same communities. Asserting that Indigenous community and intellectual property rely on co-constructing narratives—effectively operating as two sides of the same conceptual coin—Erlmann writes, “indigenous community is less a descriptor of an existing social or cultural reality than it is a project of discursive bricolage” (104). Basing this theoretical argument on examples from South African policy-creation sessions and attendant debates regarding ownership of traditional knowledge, Erlmann asserts that assuming that Indigenous community is a “self-evident category” is misleading and inaccurate. Instead, Erlmann chooses to “reposition indigeneity as a fragile conglomeration of strategies, material practices, and rhetorical tropes that reflect as they enact a politics of belonging through which indigenous people may form various kinds of attachment to place, time, and expressive practices” (105).
In Part II, Joanna Bosse, Thomas Solomon, Sylvia Bruinders, and David A. McDonald compose a quartet of chapters that “prioritizes the feedback dynamics between music and community…in North American classrooms, competitive performance settings in Bolivia or South Africa, or on the stages of Palestinian music festivals” (9). Bosse’s chapter takes the concerns of Music Making Community to the classroom. What kind(s) of community are made in the classroom? Does ethnomusicological pedagogy realize the important ways that community and music are interrelated in our field research? Bosse hinges these questions on the issue of embodied performance, arguing that learning to perform music as an embodied method that creates an embodied form of knowledge is poorly represented in undergraduate classrooms, where the emphasis tends toward the dissemination of disembodied knowledge and evaluations in the form of written assignments, papers, and exams. Bosse advocates for a new pedagogical model in which “students learn how music can build and shape community not through words, texts, and tests, but through their lived musical experiences” (145). Solomon finds “different kinds of social relationships that constitute musical communities” being performed in the context of musical competitions in highland Bolivia (151). Solomon asserts that performers construct “moments of community” (152) that are contingent on, and not necessarily independent of, the context of competition events. From friends bonding through intimate conviviality, to interactions between anonymous urban subjects, to “colonial relations of domination,” song dueling events allow individual subjects to experience temporary connection. As such, Solomon questions music’s capacity to create community that sustains itself beyond the musicking moment, preferring instead to “advocate for a rather less ambitious understanding of the role of music in community-making that recognizes music as producing what might be called contingent, emergent, and self-contained moments of community” (170).
Sylvia Bruinders analyses another competitive genre—Christmas band competitions in the Western Cape of South Africa—as a driver of community. Drawing on Turino’s model distinguishing between participatory and presentational modes of performance, Bruinders argues that Christmas bands “do not fall easily” into either category (186). While performing competitively on stage for audiences, these bands are in presentational mode, but in other contexts, including rehearsals and accompanying road marches, every member is involved and a participatory mode prevails. David McDonald analyzes Palestinian festivals as sites for “affective assembly and coalition performance,” which, he theorizes, are “essential components for…festival activism” (194). McDonald asserts that, given the political disenfranchisement of Palestinian quotidian life in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Music Expo offers artist-activists a venue to take up space as a community action—a form of participatory performative politics. McDonald emphasizes the power of music both to enable performers to manifest communal Palestinian solidarity, and, by making their bodies vulnerable and at risk by performing in the high-stakes context of occupation (the actual), to lay claim to an embodied self-determination (the possible). Given all that has occurred in the region since the fall of 2023, this work could hardly be more timely.
Part III, consisting of chapters by Perman, Rick Deja, and Fiol, “addresses the central role that obligation and debt play in the dynamics of differentiation and the cycles of feedback that define the music/community dialectic” (9). Perman advocates a theory of ethnomusicological practice that creates community on the basis of love and indebtedness. Drawing on ethnography of Shona mbira music in Zimbabwe and the US, Perman asserts that participants cite various factors to explain their attraction to mbira practices. American players commonly cite, as their primary motivation, their love for the community created through mbira performance. But loving to play mbira in community, Perman insists, is not sufficient in and of itself; it must be coupled by a sense of indebtedness to the “owners” of these traditions, both those living, and those now in the spirit world. Perman writes: “knowledge emerging from interpersonal relationships, embedded inextricably in racial and colonial systems of inequality and depression, carry ever-deepening burdens of debt and obligation” (234). Perman’s concept of community is inclusive of ethnomusicologists and their students who, together with Shona at home and abroad, constitute a community of transnational networks of mbira practitioners. This reflexive and ethical concept of community offers food for thought as the field of ethnomusicology continues its effort to imagine a decolonized future.
Another creative rethinking of the relationship between music and community is found in Deja’s essay on sounds and social belonging in southern Africa. Deja asserts that free jazz, with its inherent freedom of expression (e.g., “there are no wrong notes”), and Afro-Jazz, as a form emphasizing sub-Saharan aesthetic practices “that facilitate a sense of belonging and group cohesion,” can “amplify a sense of community” for participants (245). Crucial to his argument, however, is performers’ conceptualizing the meanings of the freedom of free jazz and the sub-Saharan African elements in Afro jazz within a framework of transnational cosmopolitanism. Drawing on Turino’s concepts of cultural cohorts and cultural formations, and his theory that performance engages the actual with the possible, Deja hopes to advance an ethnomusicology that can highlight the making of “empathetic human connections and equitable communities” (246). Fiol’s chapter adroitly considers classic ethnographic concerns—ritual and festival—from the vantage point of community. Noting that rituals create communities “by inscribing broader cultural concepts on the person and on the collective body” (249), Fiol investigates the disjuncture between embodied notions of community originating from local ritual/festival participants, and top-down notions of community generated by Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) officials engaged in inscribing local practice as heritage. Fiol’s case study is the Ramman Festival, a masked-dance drama performed in three villages in the Himalayas of North India. Fiol analyzes the process of ICH designation, which resulted in just one of the three villages’ festivals being declared ICH. Fiol represents the ICH designation process from the perspective of four local subject positions— “a lowered status drummer, a dominant caste village leader, a state employed folklorist…and a participant from a neighboring village” (250). The complex, polyvocal picture that emerges highlights the power dynamics implicated in local community formation. As Fiol argues, “without cognizance of the ways in which dominant ideologies of community are power-blind, and without centering oppressed voices in discussions of what community means, the good intentions of community-building only perpetuate structural inequities and undermine possibilities for reparation and healing at the heart of community formation” (267).
All in all, multiple ways in which people might understand community and its interrelationship with music are displayed in Music Making Community. A complex, multidimensional texture results that showcases not just current understandings of community, but also currents in contemporary ethnomusicology. Despite the Turino- and Illinois-centrism of its participants and scope, this volume succeeds in representing a richly diverse range of analytical frameworks, ethnographic methods, performance genres, and cultural identities, resulting in a satisfying update to the scholarship on music making community.
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[Review length: 2188 words * Review posted on February 16, 2026]