Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 2
·
November 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
140
RESEARCH REPORT
Amateur Music-making as Urban Politics
Tommaso Napoli
(IUAV of Venice, Public Policy Doctorate School)
In this research I consider four different case studies of cities and the role of music as a form
of collaboration between people. In particular, my work focuses on amateur music and its role
in partnership-building in Caracas, London, Milan and Brussels. Four dimensions of making
music politics - sociality, work, culture and governance - are found in all the cases under
study.
Through an analysis of amateur music-making projects in these cities, I show how
collaboration can be different, with different motivations. In Caracas, music is created to
develop the country; here we assist observe a strong centralization of decisions. However the
various music projects not only help to solve problems, such as reducing poverty and
generating new energies or a new sense of participation in building the common goods; they
also generates problems, such as cultural conflict between ethnic and classical musical
traditions, the emigration of talents due to the lack of musical work, the local governance of
the ‘
nucleos
’, the different perspective in which musical activities are seen by students,
families, music teachers and managers, who have different ideas about the musical or social
aim of El Sistema.
In the London case I analyse the South Oxhey Choir project, a BBC project based on
the idea of creating a link between two different sides of town, which divided in two by the
railway line. The wealthy part, Carpenders Park, is characterized by the presence of middle
class people, who own their houses. The poor part of the city, South Oxhey, makes a rare case
of social housing in a large estate built and managed by the London City Council in the '50s.
The choir, after the direct involvement (also financial) of the BBC, survives and continues to
play its role as a link between the two parts of the city.
In the Milan case study, I address the social consequences of the Italian approach to
music. I focus on the ‘Milan Accademia Morigi Orchestra’. Through a set of decisions made
in the assembly, the association’s structures were bypassed and musical control given to the
conductor, generating the collapse of the democratic life of the association in the name of
musical quality. This way of addressing amateur music-playing as a form of activity without
social meaning generates a sense of guilt among the musicians, which marks to a larger extent
the Italian ‘
marchetta
’. The word
marchetta
is used for performances in which musicians may
be paid but have the feeling of not playing at the expected level of musical quality.
Finally, in Brussels case study, I look at another form of collaboration among
musicians, embodied by the Cambristi Association. This association is structured simply as a
group of people who enjoy playing chamber music. Members can freely keep in touch with
each other, and form duos, trios, quartets, and so on. Nothing is requested of the members,
