Israel in the 21st century is an intensely multicultural society where several types of cosmopolitanism vie with regional and ethnic forms of expression, a phenomenon that plays out in musical life. I propose that such a society offers a variety of possibilities for what a woman is, what she can do, and how she can work. This dissertation is an ethnographic study of four female singer-songwriters that examines the ways they negotiate and sometimes challenge socio-cultural norms in creating their careers and constructing their artistic personae, or the version of themselves that they present as musicians.

The artists I focus on straddle four major rifts in Israeli society, between Arabs and Jews, Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, Russian-speaking immigrants and native Israelis, and Orthodox and non-Orthodox communities. In using their ethnic heritage as cultural capital to corner a unique market niche, these artists become enmeshed in social politics that include tensions between ethnic and religious groups, conflicting gender roles, and struggles over belonging. I argue that as they create legible personae to meet the demands of the music industry, their liminality between mainstream society and a minority sector challenges the discourse around those identities. The success of their careers thus depends both on how their particular ethnicity is positioned in relation to more powerful models of Israeliness that are reproduced by public discourses, the state media and the entertainment industry, as well as how they meet commercial criteria for mainstream pop music. In working to satisfy this dual set of demands they engage with the canon of Israeli music, revealing and expanding its boundaries.

To illuminate how the artists define and challenge discourses of Israeliness, I analyze their songs, how they perform them, and what people say about them. The radio airtime their music receives and the venues where they perform further reveal how they are positioned within Israeli culture. Thus while the strategies they use in marking themselves as foreign are common to artists cross-culturally, the challenges they encounter offer a window onto changing social patterns in contemporary Israeli society.

This dissertation offers a descriptive, anthropological account of diverse phenomenologies of egalitarian ethics through an experimental ethnography of music and social interaction among performers of free improvisation. Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork with improvisers in Berlin, Chicago, and San Francisco as a saxophonist and participant in these scenes, I show how performers of free improvisation refrain from instructing or criticizing their peers out of respect for their creative liberty and to maintain their experience of equal status. Consequently, I argue that canonical modes of musical ethnography tend to confirm the utopian conception of free improvisation, widely promoted in discourses on this form of musicking over the past half century, as a practice in which performers are liberated from aesthetic constraints and interpersonal hierarchies.

This project highlights the shortcomings of typical modes of musical and anthropological fieldwork through an experimental fusion of ethnography and arts-technology research in which I have asked improvisers to critique the interactive and performance capabilities of a virtual performer, known as “Maxine.” Designed based on my experiences improvising with, watching, and listening to others, Maxine is simultaneously a virtual performer but also a form of interactive, algorithmic ethnography. By asking improvisers to play with this system and compare it to human performers, the fieldwork presented in this dissertation illustrates how improvisers espouse a wide variety of notions of how egalitarian experience is realized in how each player listens and responds to others in the course of performance. Crucially, it demonstrates that what is revealed in an encounter with a nonhuman social interactant like Maxine is precisely what often escapes canonical approaches to ethnographic fieldwork. Broadly speaking, while some improvisers regard continual displays of attentiveness from their partners as essential to the experience and performance of an egalitarian ethos in musical interaction, others regard these behaviors as injurious to the ideal of a nonhierarchical sociality in sound.

In the process of offering this experiential account of egalitarianism, this dissertation illustrates the many ways in which the design of artificial social interactants implicitly poses a variety of provocative hypotheses about the nature of listening and musical cognition as it takes place between improvisers, many of which are yet to be tested through methodologies such as the one practiced in this project as well as analysis of recorded performances of free improvisation. Furthermore, I also argue that the methodology developed in this project suggests productive new avenues for phenomenologically-oriented ethnography in that encounters with an artificial social interactant like Maxine elicit commentary on real-time sociality as an experience which participants normally refrain from discussing, both within and far beyond free improvisation. By eliciting explicit articulations of ethical normativities, as conceived of by improvisers interacting with Maxine, this project also responds to recent work in the anthropology of ethics by suggesting that much of human moral experience may take the form of latent moral critiques, in which subjects experience an unfulfilled desire to express criticism of the behavior of their interlocutors but nonetheless refrain from doing so for a variety of reasons. Lastly, I argue that subjecting artificial social interactants to the evaluation of the human beings they are modeled upon constitutes a radically new, vibrant form of critical ethnography, one which is implicitly performed throughout the field of human computer interaction even if its practitioners hardly theorize it as such.

Andalucía, Spain's southernmost region is the epicenter of a contemporary scene comprised of North African and European musicians whose projects integrate aspects of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) genres with elements of Spanish flamenco, related Iberian folkloric styles, and European early music. This ethnography of collaborative, mixed-musical practices explores how key musicians in this scene find ways to engage diverse backgrounds and trainings as they seek to combine musical systems, and how they consider their projects in the context of a contested past that links the Iberian Peninsula to North Africa. Following the ways in which these artists explore both real and imagined links between musical systems and historical trajectories, I argue that a phenomenon of experiencing musical connection—by which I refer to a complex mix of perceiving, desiring, and believing in a musical, cultural, or historical tie between musical practices and practitioners—animates music-making practices in several ways. This phenomenon impels the pursuit of the past as remembered and understood; nourishes the acquisition of new musical abilities; and illuminates a set of interactive possibilities within an ensemble, ultimately inspiring novel forms of musical creativity.

Further, I suggest that some of the musical recordings and performances that emerge from these collaborations make what I am calling sonic interventions in Mediterranean social memory, undercutting standard histories that obscure, deny, or efface the sizeable contribution of Arab-Islamic culture to Spain and Portugal, and revealing—in the sense of recovering and manifesting anew— points of continuity and cultural overlap between North Africa, the Middle East, and the Iberian Peninsula. Through the course of the thesis I develop the theoretical notion of sonic intervention in parallel with the concept of musicality as a multifaceted sensibility, an idea that treats musical thinking and memory as active, creative processes that register at multiple levels, from the personal, to the interpersonal, and finally to larger social groups.

In order to understand the phenomenon of musical connection and the different ways that musicians intervene in collective memory, this thesis traces two lines of inquiry. The first relates to how musicians make creative use of the past, particularly the contested cultural legacy of al-Andalus. I explore how several Moroccan-Spanish (more broadly, MENA-Euro) collaborative projects based in present-day Andalusia are animated by particular ways of relating to the past as remembered.

The second aspect of my inquiry concerns issues in music cognition having to do with competence, multimusicality, and musical thinking in ensemble interaction—how musicians of different backgrounds and sensibilities (languages, desires, etc.) relate to one another and work together. While the collaborations I discuss often draw on a pervasive, intuited sense of similarity between musical styles, in fact they require, sustain, and develop a diverse set of knowledges, skills, creative faculties, and sensibilities that are distributed throughout an ensemble.

As the project moves between close analysis of musical practices and broader discussion of the larger, contested narratives of a shared cultural past, I explore how musicians from both sides of the Gibraltar Strait experience, negotiate, and make sense of their presumably shared cultural inheritance. Ultimately this thesis argues for a dynamic, intimate, and mutually informing relationship between musical competence and collective memory. In so doing this dissertation contributes to a more nuanced understanding of early-21st-century, collaborative music making in the Western Mediterranean.