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This chapter discusses the persistent tensions and interrelations between the neomelodica music scene and organized crime. Neomelodica is perceived as an entrepreneurial art of l’arte di arrangiarsi (“the art of making do”), pertinent to a localized, informal, and sometimes illicit, undertaking built upon limited resources. Partnerships with the camorra are considered an act of entrepreneurial excess—one that is treated either as a necessary potentiality to performing arrangiarsi to the utmost or as a venture to be condemned. Yet despite these contentions in the neomelodica music scene, the genre itself has received aesthetic critiques and acclaim independent of their real and perceived associations with organized crime. Neomelodica is, after all, a remix of traditional and outdated music—a chaotic and unpredictable mix of the formal, informal, and illicit.

Sonny Blount arrived in Chicago in 1946. This chapter examines his initial years in the city, where musical work in different circumstances—show-club arranging with Fletcher Henderson at the Club DeLisa, session recordings for Leonard Chess’s Aristocrat label, self-recorded rehearsals with young bebop players, strip-club accompaniment in Calumet City—offered both hardship and extraordinary musical variety. Tracing Blount’s activities across various settings reveals how particular racial and spatial conditions affected different centers of musical production, how production at these sites addressed an array of social issues, and how one cohort of South Side musicians developed community ideals that ranged beyond conventional liberal notions of black leadership and progress. Despite the racial conflicts and economic challenges reshaping black Chicago, Sonny Blount and many of his colleagues experienced the early post–World War II years as a historical moment full of possibility.

This chapter describes the Nashville music scene from both geographic and historical perspectives. The founding artists of the MuzikMafia did not incite a revolution in Nashville; they merely worked the system. Thus, a discussion of the MuzikMafia must begin with the system itself: the Nashville scene. The many districts and venues that comprise Nashville’s music scene reflect the city’s musical diversity. Nashville’s rich musical history shows that the city’s roots are by no means limited to commercial country. The early presence and historical significance of art music, dance bands, and jazz is little known. However, these styles have been integral components of musical life in Nashville since the first half of the twentieth century. Nashville also has a close relationship with rock music since the rise of rock and roll in the 1950s.

This chapter explores the degree to which heritage becomes a space and provides a set of itineraries that can in turn be mobilized in order to envision possible futures. The current lack of an active live music scene in Nassau effectively precludes practice-based futures, and this has been the case since at least the 1980s. The chapter illustrates that a vision of the future built on successful mobilization of nostalgia has become a dominant means of attempting to reinvigorate the present. The mobilization of nostalgia during the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century was clearly driven by a need to (re)connect to an elusive core of Bahamian identity. Nostalgia thus became useful in direct proportion to the extent that cosmopolitanism eclipsed the back-to-the-bush projects of the 1970s and early 1980s.

With music, words, and images, the musicians in Israel's ethnic music scene map the past, present, and future of their cultural terrain. They refer to places, times, and heritages through their choices of titles for compositions, albums, and ensembles. The images in their publicity and CD covers are tools for evoking particular historical, geographical, and cultural associations, while the texts of publicity materials and liner notes convey more explicit messages that reiterate or augment these images. Compared to Alei Hazayit and Bustan Abraham, Yair Dalal has deployed the richest array of symbols with his lushly illustrated, multipage CD booklets, his numerous referential composition titles, and the press materials that adorn his Web site. Members of Bustan Abraham were strikingly wary of political interpretations. Their Live Concerts, issued two years after the group's demise, bears the trace of that sociopolitical reality on the band's oeuvre.

This chapter considers how young people’s involvement in a local or virtual music scene can be important in terms of providing them with a sense of self-worth and esteem. Although the topic of music scenes has been comprehensively researched in academic scholarship, the connection between scene membership and physical and psychological wellbeing has not to date been a topic of focus. The chapter draws on original empirical data generated during interviews with young people in Margaret River, Western Australia, in 2016–17. Although our research findings originate from a localized source, they can be extrapolated to broader debates concerning the relationship between young people, music, and wellbeing.

This chapter focuses on Barber’s earliest involvement of the performer in the creative process of a composition, in this case the Cello Sonata, premiered by Orlando Cole. The two would meet regularly, with Cole offering suggestions for improvements to the music. This fresh new take in composing music was instantly recognized by friends and audience alike. The founder of the Curtis Institute, Mary Bok, made further efforts in advancing Barber’s and also Gian Carlo Menotti’s careers by conducting auditions with music publishers. This resulted in publications of Barber’s work by G. Schirmer, as well as national radio performances where he was recognized as a pianist, composer, and singer. The chapter also describes Barber’s second large orchestral work, Music for a Scene from Shelley. He also wrote incidental music for a play by Mary Kennedy, One Day of Spring, presented at the Annie Russell Theater in Winter Park, Florida.

This concluding chapter reexamines national and regional struggles over immigration policy. It reiterates how making music constitutes a form of political action and builds community through dialectical collaboration between musicians and audience members; in addition, it analyzes what this research means for a conceptualization of the city as a cultural center and for the future of Latino music in the U.S. South. After all, in the Latin music scene in Charlotte, musicians are making popular music in the midst of immense political, economic, and social change and despite the indifference of the Latin music industry. In practices such as the “collective circle,” they are demanding a right to the city and are making spaces where music lives and thrives as a uniquely southern and Latino cultural expression.

This chapter describes Shreveport’s colorful rock scene during the 1970s and 1980s, and links this musical culture with the city’s economic, political, and social history during the same era. It highlights pop musicians from Shreveport—such as Victoria Williams and Joe Osborn—who have influenced music well beyond the boundaries of the Ark-La-Tex.

This chapter discusses the hip-hop and blues scene at Red’s Juke Joint in the Mississippi Delta. It suggests that while the juke joint is made from worn materials, it was able to retain a wealth of local meaning, history, and style. The chapter also provides a description of the music scene by local artists and patrons of the joint, including blues singer and guitarist Wesley Jefferson, toast-teller Antonio Coburn, and bluesman Kenny Brown.

The epilogue details the author’s final thoughts regarding his experiences within the neomelodica music scene as well as his investigations into the camorra. His interactions with the various characters mentioned in this book—while illuminating—are also filled with frustrations for want of a determinate denouement or ending. These people engage in murky affective-aesthetic experiences with the camorra. They are complicit in the more illegal practices of making do in the neomelodica music scene, in order to, perhaps someday acquire a determinate future. Yet few can obtain such futures, but it has never been about ultimate achievements. In the end, the art of making do is about the small accomplishments—about living with the reality of indeterminacy. Indeterminate prospects are, after all, not necessarily hollow ones.

This chapter covers the microscenes perspective that differentiates Chicago’s underground rap music scene from backpackers. At the corporate tier of the rap music industry, backpacker rap is less commercially viable than gangsta rap. While there are people who opt for the less commercial backpacker music, who earn respect for having artistic purity, the corporate music industry tends to focus its efforts on gangsta rap. However, gangsta rappers have fewer career options than backpackers. Outside the microscene, the stigma attached to the gangsta persona and its behavioral and performative requirements make it difficult for gangstas to attend school or obtain traditional employment. With low levels of education and few prospects, the gang members viewed rap as their only legitimate ticket to achieving upward mobility.