ABSTRACT
The respective and closely connected interpretations of the term “music scene” offered by Straw (1991) and Shank (1994) each recognize and strive to articulate the spatial interactivity of music places, namely how ideas transit through, around and between physical spaces. As such, urban spaces have become a major focus for work interrogating music scenes, provoking a range of studies that investigate how a city’s cultural, physical and political environments shape—and are shaped by—music practice (see, for example, Stahl 2004; Grazian 2004). To date, however, much of the research carried out on music scenes has focused on scenes located in urban centers and with strongly articulated, historical legacies, which often extend to established trans-local connections with other urban music scenes also centrally positioned within flows of cultural production, performance and consumption (see, for example, Bennett and Peterson 2004). Another notable feature of the scene narratives typically presented in academic work is that they are often largely historical. To put this another way, music scenes are often recalled from the memories of respondents actively trying to describe events of the past as a means of making sense of the present. Indeed, as the work of theorists such as DeNora (2000) has revealed, in recollecting their musical past, individuals are able to use music as a part of what she describes as a “technology of the self” in order to reproduce themselves in the present. Through extrapolating DeNora’s argument to the collective memory work embedded in music scenes, we suggest that a similar process can be observed. Moreover, we propose that, just as DeNora’s participants articulated both positive and negative perceptions of music in their memory work, so this can be observed in the collective memory work embedded in scenes. Thus, in this chapter, we analyze a number of scene stories taken from two smaller Australian cities: Brisbane (the capital of Queensland) and Hobart (the capital of the island state of Tasmania). Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2012 and 2013, and encompassing over twenty participant interviews, this chapter examines how the aspirant, developing and unstable nature of these two cities appears in various ideologies surrounding music practice. These are two “marginal” or “fringe” Australian capitals and they remain rapidly changing urban spaces. The music scenes that reside within these cities are steeped in notions of this discontinuity, fracture and rejuvenation. As such, we argue that the music practice described in these places comes to closely mirror the core issues driving the scene concept itself.
