Guerrilla Music : Musicking as Resistance, Defiance, and Subversion

Guerrilla Music: Musicking as Resistance, Defiance, and Subversion provides a timely exploration of human initiations and responses to music as a process and product intrinsically part of our culture, history, place, time, and ecological musical worlds. The contributors challenge scholarly approaches wherein music is detached from the social relationships in which it is produced, transmitted, used, and judged. The notion of ‘guerrilla’ is a trope long applied to socio-political machinations, human conflict, and confrontation. Providing a provocative lens through which to view musicking, Guerrilla Music explores research involving human practices of music, stories, communities, and musickers worldwide that employ music to resist, defy, and subvert, whether by silence and non-compliance, reluctant subordination, subversive depowering, resistive counterpoint, or destructive, violent dismantling. The ambition of such musicking experiences resides in the richness of specific contexts spanning the subcultural local, glocal, and the universal. What better way to understand the potency of these passionate human traits than through interrogation and celebration of the life worlds of music, musicians, and those that become engulfed in musical maelstroms that incite change. Guerrilla Music both invigorates and advances scholarly debates about social power, colonisation, and difference by simultaneously exploring the social semiotics of music making and music communities, identifying powerful new ways of understanding human communication, the power of music, and what musicking means to people in the twenty-first century.