Harmonies and cacophonies

This research will have attained its goal if it has managed to convince the reader of the complexity of the relations between music and protest. We have examined numerous properties which allow musical devices to support processes that are necessary for collective mobilisation: communalisation, conflictualisation, historic legacy, undermining authority, calling for support, fundraising etc. Yet we have also seen that this level of analysis is insufficient and that we must also observe how musical performances can participate in the exchange of ‘blows’ between protest actors and protagonists of conventional political competition. Finally, it is clearly necessary to take into account the plurality of social uses of music but also the effects of the professionalisation of its practice. In this, the vocation of music for protest appears even more inevitable because it seems divided, torn between competing objectives that are more or less compatible with a critique of the social order.

When critical objectives take precedence over other alternatives for artistic practices, musical performances appear as powerful auxiliaries to protest action. Yet a convergence of this kind is far from self-evident. Refusing all overhasty generalisations, the analysis proposed over the course of this book argues for observations on a case-by-case basis, of the complex, equivocal, often spontaneous and fluid relations between music and protest. Ultimately, it is up to the observer to specify, in light of detailed and well-defined research, the conditions and procedures that effectively manage to transform certain musical devices into vectors for protest. Of course, under certain conditions, protest objectives and musical performances are unable to find a harmonious congruence and mutual reinforcement. However, it is not unusual for their proximity to instead reveal a multitude of approaches, divergences in motives, uncontrolled effects of the interdependence of the actors, vague and porous borders in the value systems they proclaim, and, finally, frequent discordances between practice and discourse. In other words, the study of the protest aspects of music provides an important point from which to observe the complexities of the social – and more specifically, the collective – action which aims to weigh on the social and political order.