Tuning-in Together, Art Worlds and Cultural Air in Taiwan
Sorry Youth is considered to be one of the most 'Taiwanese flavoured' bands, a new cultural entrepreneur who makes a living by taking on prolific cases. It participates in anti-China campaigns and supports Taiwanese independence, performing and profiting from a mixture of aesthetic autonomy and political practice. The Academy of Taiwan Strings, a European-trained classical music ensemble, is more of an amateur in society, earning a living as a private music tutor, adhering to the rules of the art world but also is constrained by it, wandering between the western canonical repertoire and the limited social activities that are still seen as lacking Taiwanese flavour or 'rebellion'.
This study reconstructs the methods of Becker, Schütz and Adorno to compare how the two ensembles operate in normative ways to maintain their legitimacy, particularly by absorbing 'cultural performance' (Alexander, 2006 ; McCormick, 2015), and how they collaborate (including in external relations) with the systems of collective representation, the means of symbolic production, audience perspectives and social power.
This article argues that musical communication is inseparable from social cooperation, and is a 'mutual tuning-in' of identity, social resources and even social space in a particular 'cultural air', constituting of actions that serve idealised and instrumental interests (in the Weberian sense); it is not only 'musical performance', but also not entirely a product of 'identity'. Musicians participate in social change through multiple practices of creativity, resistance and conformity.