Guerrilla Music: Musicking as Resistance, Defiance, and Subversion

Guerrilla Music: Musicking as Resistance, Defiance, and Subversion explores human initiations and responses to music as a process and product intrinsically part of our culture, history, place, time and ecological musical worlds. The contributors challenge scholarly approaches wherein music is detached from the social relationships in which it is produced, transmitted, used and judged. ’Guerrilla’ is a trope long applied to socio-political machinations, human conflict and confrontation. Guerrilla Music provocatively explores research involving music practices, stories, communities and musickers worldwide that resist, defy and subvert by silence and non-compliance, reluctant subordination, subversive depowering, resistive counterpoint, or destructive, violent dismantling. Contexts spanning the subcultural local, glocal and universal highlight the potency, passions, actions and life worlds of music, musicians and those that become engulfed in musical maelstroms that incite change. Guerrilla Music both invigorates and advances scholarly debates about social power, colonisation and difference by exploring the social semiotics of music making and communities, identifying powerful new ways of understanding human communication, and what musicking means in the twenty-first century.

Leon de Bruin is senior lecturer in music at the University of Melbourne, Conservatorium of Music and coordinator of the Master of Music Performance Teaching Degree Program (MMPT).

Jane Southcott is professor in the faculty of education at Monash University.