Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia have gained national recognition for indie rock and punk music, respectively, since the 1980s. As the cities' local music scene creates revenue, local business and city leaders actively support local music in order to revitalize downtown as a center of culture and consumption.   Similar to other post-industrial southern cities, both cities actively work to expand industries in knowledge, culture and, tourism. My dissertation examines the tense relationship between independent music and its commodification among musicians, organizers, entrepreneurs and, city officials in Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia. In these cities, I engaged in eighteen months of fieldwork, conducted over eighty interviews, and researched twentieth century archives of major local print media.  

Based on my research, I argue that local music generates social connections as a form of capital in the creation of local community and local consumption. As groups of people in small cities join together to support particular genres of music, the boundary between 'listener' and musician is fluid, as many people perform both roles.   Participants come to know one another, exchanging musical interests and favors.   Most often, these people meet at bars, clubs and coffeehouses, where they purchase tickets, food and drink.   But the economic value of these music communities is not limited to their own buying power.   Participants are cultural brokers whose presence draws other local people to the scene.   Depending on the buying power of the consumers they draw, businesses and even the city itself will create or inhibit infrastructural support for particular genre-based scenes.    When the music, consumers and local infrastructure come together, there are greater and more consistent opportunities for musicians to perform and be heard.   In this case, musicians often feel ambivalent about their role as agents of urban renewal. They also grow skeptical over time about whether local opportunity will lead to the wider recognition they seek.   When there is conflict between the music, the crowd they draw, and the economic goals of the city, scenes are routinely shut down.   In this case musicians and their audiences carve out alternative spaces such as warehouses, clothing stores and basements, spaces that are subject to closure and policing.   They also are more dependent on connections with musicians in other cities than are their locally supported counterparts.

My dissertation connects the practice of music-making in Charlottesville and Richmond to larger urban, economic, and technological conditions of the late capitalist digital age.   In the first chapter, while tracing the historical relationship between mass culture and local music production in each city, I show how changes in the music industry and music technologies have transformed local music audiences into vast numbers of local musicians.   In the second chapter, by describing the identity and career of local musicians, I show how local music production has become more individualized and more mass oriented as musicians focus on performing original music with a global audience in mind.   In the third chapter, I explain how the genre-based scenes of rock, hip-hop and experimental music overlap, conflict and cooperate in the development of a city-based music scene. In the fourth chapter, I map out the institutions and social networks involved in the maintenance and transformation of these city-based music scenes to demonstrate the effects of public-private partnerships, grassroots marketing strategies, and the local effects of digital social networks.   In the fifth chapter, I evaluate how each city distributes resources relative to the city's urban redevelopment strategies, local business connections with multi-national music industries, and residents' use of new media technology.   I conclude by assessing the effects of these changes in musical production on the different demographic groups that are creating music in each city.

Abstracts of Selected Work
Shopping, Playing and Posing:
The Genders of Rock Authenticity in Music Instrument Stores
[Manuscript in Progress]

In the 1990s, scholars documented women's increased participation in rock music, a traditionally male homo-social field.   The topic has since fallen silent, in part because the "women in rock" movement is now a market demographic. This ethnographic study examines the gendered culture of musical instrument stores in small town America, places where aspiring musicians form social networks and learn about musical technologies.   I ask, how do men and women assert their status as knowledgeable, capable creators of music through shopping?   Through interpretive analysis of interactions in stores, I find as stores increase in scale, communication among participants relies less on technological knowledge and more on competitive fraternizing, privileging interaction styles men are socialized to possess. Women rely on each other for support and use the store to purchase, not socialize.   This strategy helps women navigate a male-dominated space, but fails to insert them into local musician's networks.

Local Culture for Sale:
Small Town Music Monopoly, Small Town Resistance
[ASA Presentation New York, NY 2007]

In the era of consumer capitalism, is there any such thing as music that is produced outside of the culture industry? The distinction between mass culture and local or independently made culture is central to musician's evaluations of their craft and to sociologist's analyses of music making. This paper questions the salience of this distinction. It is an ethnographic project on the music scene of a small college town that has lofty aims as the self-proclaimed "center of the musical universe." Its thriving local scene is generated in large part by the financial and social capital of a group of local rock musicians and entrepreneurs who have gained national fame in the music industry. These men have invested their capital back into the local economy, tying their businesses to the city's experiments in new urbanism. At the same time, other music businesses and organizations form to resist the monopoly these men have on the scene. I argue that the tension between local monopoly and local resistance generates important resources for rock musicians and young college alumni entering into culture industry professions. Yet at the same time, those who play other genres such as metal and hip-hop can be sidelined within the local economy. As cultural resources are becoming synonymous with economic resources, access to making local culture is a new indicator of existing social inequalities in urban spaces.

Making Mountains Into Men:
Memory and Mourning in the Fall of the Old Man on the Mountain
[ESS Presentation, New York, NY 2008]

The Old Man on the Mountain was a stone edifice in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Since it was "discovered" by white men in 1805, it has become an expression of New Hampshire identity, both to tourists and residents themselves. Despite costly and laborious efforts to maintain it, the Old Man fell in 2004. Since this time, locals and tourists alike have been in a process of mourning and remembrence. This process involves economic and political considerations of how to build memory as a tourist attraction, as well as debates about what the symbol meant and how it should be remembered. In this paper, I review the economic and political changes experienced by the old man in order to understand when and how his meaning changed over time. I examine the time of his "death" where contests over memory and meaning are most discussed. Through archival work with local literature and content analysis of notes left at his memorial, I find that locals see the old man as a symbol of libertarian freedoms and rugged individualism and non-locals interpret his death and rebirth in a Christian framework. I argue that tourist culture and local identity are not separate entities, with tourist culture consciously overlaid or imposed upon local identity. At the same time, these meanings are contested between locals and tourists as well as among locals.