CFAMH750 – Richard Thompson 1

Community Context Paper 1: Space

My name is Richard Thompson, and I am a musician and teacher from

Boston, MA. I am a member of numerous communities, musical and otherwise, but

for the focus of this paper I have chosen the community that I am involved in when I

perform as a wedding-band musician. This community consists of myself, along

with the seven other musicians in the band Boston Common, the DJ with whom we

perform, as well as our crew members who control the lighting and sound system

and transport the necessary gear and equipment. While these band and crew

members remain relatively consistent (aside from a substitute member now and

then), this community also includes the guests of each wedding, which change for

every event. Although this instability is a salient factor of the community, these

different audiences are united in their purpose for attending each event, which is to

celebrate the union of their friends or family members. Additionally, although the

cultural heritage of the audience can directly affect the musical proceedings as I will

discuss later, the type of setting and use of American musicians remains constant

from wedding to wedding.

The members of this community vary widely in demographics. On the band

side, members range in age from 25-42, with various nationalities and backgrounds.

Most of the members have been educated at a music school, and most, but not all,

were born and raised in America. On the audience side, members range in age from

young children to very old adults, again with various nationalities and backgrounds,

but the majority having lived in America. This “American-bred” commonality is

expressed in the location of the event, and the type of music performed. In this
CFAMH750 – Richard Thompson 2

case, the ceremony and reception are taking place in America (more specifically,

greater New England), and the band (with one or two exceptions) has been hired to

play American music.

My band’s wedding repertoire consists of American popular music, from the

1960’s to the present. Songs are chosen by the bandleader based on their familiarity

to the majority of the audience. A parallel can be drawn between this wedding

music and the “ubiquitous musics” described by Kassabian in her book of the same

title. According to Kassabian, ubiquitous musics are the musics that people hear in

public spaces, those musics that people aren’t necessarily actively listening to, but

that still produce “affective responses, bodily events that ultimately lead in part to

what we call emotion.”1 In choosing popular music that most of the audience has

heard before, the bandleader is attempting to capitalize on the ubiquity of these

songs. He is deliberately selecting songs that have been woven throughout the lives

of the audience members, and will therefore produce an affective physical or

emotional response – preferably one that encourages the audience to dance in our

case.

Performing popular songs is a way of uniting the audience as well. As

mentioned earlier, the audience and band have varied backgrounds, with any

number of different nationalities and cultural heritages. Popular music, with its

ubiquity, can connect the individual members of the band and audience. Just as

connected nodes in a computer network, the affective responses from ubiquitous

1
Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Subjectivity
(Berkeley: Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), xi.
CFAMH750 – Richard Thompson 3

music create what Kassabian calls distributed subjectivity. 2 This distributed

subjectivity can effectively erase the individual differences amongst audience and

band members, at least for a short time. Kassabian offers an example of the singing

of a national anthem, which “invokes pride and community, a warm feeling of

belonging.”3 The popular music repertoire that we perform, when chosen correctly

(i.e. the majority of the audience is familiar with it), operates in much the same way.

Beyond the distributed subjectivity of ubiquitous popular music, it is

interesting to examine how specific cultural musics are utilized to create a different

sense of space within the same location as our performance of American popular

music. At a recent wedding, the band’s set break was filled by the DJ with traditional

Greek music. For the attendees, this offered a moment of “distributed tourism,”

transporting the guests to Greece, while simultaneously remaining together in New

England.4 For the guests familiar with the music, this produced an affective

response, joining in the traditional dance, and throwing money at the bride and

groom. Even for those unfamiliar with the music, their physical proximity to the

cultural musical event created a sense of entanglement, effictively bringing them

into the community, and allowing them to participate as distributed tourists as well. 5

Kassabian talks about the shifting nature of identity – how identity can

change from one moment to the next, even in the same space. 6 Over the course of a

2
Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Subjectivity
(Berkeley: Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), xxiv-xxvi.
3
Anahid Kassabian, xxvii.
4
Anahid Kassabian, 101.
5
Anahid Kassabian, 102.
6
Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Subjectivity
(Berkeley: Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), xxvii
CFAMH750 – Richard Thompson 4

few hours, the identity of these wedding guests changed from that of Americans, to

that of Greeks, and back again, due to the nature of the musicking that occurred

within that space at any given time. While this particular example involved Greek

Americans, I have witnessed the very same phenomenon numerous times, with a

variety of cultures, showing the power of music, and its effect on the temporality of

any given space.

Bibliography

Kassabian, Anahid. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed

CFAMH750 – Richard Thompson 5

Subjectivity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.