The Quality of Mutuality: Jazz Musicians in the Athenian Popular Music Industry

Abstract

It was during an introductory course in 1998, my fi rst encounter with ethnomusicology, that I stumbled upon the idea that quality judgments in music are cultural constructs. The selected readings (Small 1977; Blacking 1973) demonstrated the central, if complex, role of musicality in the human condition. The idea that ‘quality’ in music was culture specifi c, however, was diffi cult for me to grasp. It wasn’t so much the superiority of ‘classical’ music that I was concerned with; I was a mediocre classical pianist who had, early enough, switched to jazz. Nevertheless, accepting the fact that value judgments in music were only temporally and locally specifi c demanded the reconfi guration of my view of the Greek music scene in which I was becoming professionally involved. ‘Quality’ serves as a fundamental discourse within urban Greek music production. Musicians, audience, critics, press, and popular media refer to ‘musical quality’ in variable and self-contradictory ways. Being immersed in this discourse since childhood provided my local colleagues and I with a quasi-ideological attitude toward the evaluation of music genres and styles. Having to deconstruct these ideologies and detect the cultural specifi cities that formulate them has proven to be the most challenging task of my research among Athenian professional musicians.

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