Music making as urban guerrilla : Challenging the aesthetico-political orderings of Berlin's public spaces

Analyzing a guerilla concert of a young string ensemble from Berlin the paper presents music making as a set of socio material practices which aesthetically organize a wide range of people, technologies and places. The composition of the concert is presented as an enactment of various kinds of socio-material relations, which rely on their mechanical, symbolical and aesthetical performativity. As the concert takes place outside the concert hall, the ensemble encounters various challenges and resistances with respect to the participation of various human and non-human actors. Different modes of organizing music, the city’s public spaces, the audience and the young musicians become visible as they interfere with the ordering logic of the ensemble. By means of an audio-visual ethnography the study explores how multiple logics of organizing music performances in Berlin overlap, produce tensions and enact multiple versions of “good” music. Drawing on the literature of Actor-Network Theory (and its developments after) as well as on conceptual advances made in human geography under the label of “Morethan- representational theorizing” (such as a the coupling of the relational materialism with the concept of affect), the paper aims at analyzing the complex politics of making “good” music. I will argue that such a politics cannot be framed as a simple struggle for or against specific modes of aesthetically enacting music but largely relies on the unfolding of affective dynamics which allow to accommodate multiple and contradictory modes of participating in the music event. For a preview of some of the material see: http://vimeo.com/26186028