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Factors affecting the musical choices of audiences in East Suffolk, England*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Carole Pegg
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Extract

In discussing humanly organised sound in How Musical is Man?, John Blacking points out that musical ability is not only the prerogative of those who make music. Without the capacity of an audience for structured listening, he says, there would be no music and no musical communication (Blacking 1973, p. 9). The construction of a sound-ideal, that is the acceptance or rejection of patterns of sound as music or non-music, is part of the musical process. When Merriam constructed his model for ethnomusicological research in The Anthropology of Music, he recognised that those listening to the sounds produced by musicians played an active role (Merriam 1964, pp. 32ff). He also realised the importance of what he called ‘conceptualisation about music’ to the process. Figure 1 illustrates simply the three analytical stages of his model and the feedback system involving the acceptance or rejection of sound. The weakness of the model lies in the assumption that those listening will react uniformly to the sounds produced. As I shall show, such a consensus on the classifications of sound is not to be found in large differentiated societies.

Type
Part 2. Audiences and Musical Tastes
Information
Popular Music , Volume 4 , January 1984 , pp. 51 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

References

Books and articles

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Records

Brightwell, J. 1975, Songs from the Eel's Foot, Topic 12TS261Google Scholar
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Webb, P., Austin, E. and Hart, B. 1974, Flash Company, Topic 12TS243Google Scholar