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Susie J. Tanenbaum. Underground Harmonies: Music and Politics in the Subways of New York. Cornell University Press, 1995. xiv, 270 pp.
Susie Tanenbaum's Underground Harmonies is a significant addition to the scant scholarly literature on musical performance in public spaces (literature which includes Harrison Pepper 1990; Prato 1984; Reyes Schramm 1982). The author's investigation takes the form of an ethnography, which was conducted from 1990 to 1994.1 A major strength of this study lies in Tanenbaum's correlation of key historical dimensions of her subject (i.e., music in the New York City subway system) with current political, social, cultural, and economic variables. In alignment with this correlation, her theoretical/methodological framework integrates diverse approaches drawn from several disciplines: urban anthropology/planning/ ecology, social research, history, folklore, and, most prominently, political theory and constitutional law. Particularly with reference to the latter two approaches, a dichotomy between musical performance mediated by "cultural institutions, corporations, and government agencies" (x) on the one hand, and performance unmediated by such factors on the other, becomes a major theme exploited throughout the text.
Most fundamentally, Underground Harmonies treats music performance less as a product conveying a personalized expression within a private venue, and more as a collective practice or process contingent upon spontaneous production/consumption within a public space. The author's processual, spontaneous concept of (subway) music-making derives from a meticulous observation of "social interaction and cross-cultural exchange among musicians, between musicians and audience members, and among audience members" (x). Within this approach she effectively incorporates theoretical constructs with empirical analysis. For example, in maintaining that subway music defies previously held anthropological theories regarding dichotomies between public and private space, Tanenbaum argues (referencing Hannerz 1980) that there now exists a "flow between the two domains. . . . [P]ublic acquaintances can turn into private friends, and thus public space may contribute even more permanently to urban people's lives" (120). Accordingly, her ethnographic data are fraught with cases that amply demonstrate how public subway music production generates otherwise inhibited forms of private social action, such as dancing, singing, and dialogue.
Related to this theoretical-empirical connection, the author explicates the customary distinction between social and cultural phenomena on the one hand, and the consolidation of these two phenomena on the other.2 Cultural and social dimensions of subway...