In his 2017 book "An Uncertain Age," Paul Ocobock articulates a version of politics in colonial and post-colonial Kenya called "the elder state," which, in short, necessitates the posing of oneself as a masculine elder in order to participate in statecraft and politics. In Tanzania, I argue there are similar historical cultural structures in place that make necessary the performance of elder masculinity for proper participation in politics. Popular music, moreover, is inherently tied to politics in Tanzania, and this paradigm is explored extensively in the work of in work by Brad Weiss, Alex Perullo, and Kelly Askew, among numerous other scholars. Thus, in this presentation, I borrow the framework of the elder state to outline the way power is wielded in Tanzanian politics and popular music. I will outline what versions of masculinity are prevalent in Tanzanian popular music, and how these masculinities adjust themselves to the elder Tanzanian state. Ultimately, I argue that the success of Tanzanian popular musicians is in no small part related to how successfully they can adapt to and negotiate "ideal" masculinity in muscial cultural spaces. I will also discuss the ways that women, who seek to engage and thrive in these musical spaces, must additionally find ways to mirror or adhere to an expectation of masculinity, broadly defined. Ultimately, these adaptations can help an artist endear themselves to the Tanzanian government, and earn them real political power.

This paper explores bagpipers’ hyper-masculine social and musical environment by examining their gestural and musical cultivation of embodied stoicism. Piping bodies are put under considerable strain: tendonitis, focal dystonia, deafness, performance anxiety, and palliative alcohol use are common, yet pipers are reluctant to admit to such afflictions as they are bound by performative conventions of physical and emotional discipline and a strict gestural stoicism that derives partly from the pipes’ martial context. Even in solo performance marching is often the only bodily movement that is regularly permitted, and a militarily rigid posture indicates the strength and stamina of the musician’s body. Such performances of stoicism contrast with other musical arts, where gestural variety rather than containment is more often identified as a medium through which to express and construct identity. Yet pipers do not understand their gestural habitus as oppressive. Instead, an absence of individualism is a highly sought after quality within pipe bands, where top performers strive to play “as one” with their bandmates; furthermore, gestural containment is widely understood as the background against which performers can cultivate judiciously minimal forms of individual expression, an accomplishment that in turn requires discipline and commitment not just in pipers’ musical practice but in other aspects of their lives as they prepare their bodies and minds for performance. As such the piping community represents a unique case study for exploring how norms of both gender and ability are negotiated through musical institutions and communities, and upheld and challenged in musical performance.

When a musician performing with a large-scale production can hear themselves onstage, it is usually thanks to a dedicated infrastructure and a behind-the-scenes team of specialized workers. In this paper, I examine the hidden labor of the monitor technicians on a Cirque du Soleil arena tour. From their relatively small but crucial workspace backstage—centered around a five-foot-wide digital mixing console—the monitor technicians inhabit a unique professional space of aural and emotional contradictions: they listen to the show, but only through each musician’s personalized blend of instruments and voices that is customized for each piece, which is not how audiences, front-of-house staff, or other performers hear the show. Indeed, it is not even how musicians necessarily hear themselves during performance. Meanwhile, backstage on a large-scale tour—a setting that is renowned for male-dominance and hyper-masculine registers of speech and behavior—a monitor technician’s role is one of attentive service, compromise, and care. By examining how these tensions intersect with the ostensibly seamless artistic presentation that occurs onstage, I show how monitor technicians help assemble this large-scale production through their hidden labor, while navigating creative hierarchies and shifting valences of masculinity and homosociality.