Music in Migrant Camps as a medium creating non-narrative relationships.
What is it about?
There is a musical activity in migrant camps I proposed to examine carefully. A huge importance is given today to narrative perspectives. However, the power of music is to connect people not speaking a common language and not knowing each other. . The feeling of wonder is given by the presence of music mixed with the admiration for someone who maintains an ability to play music, to control their own body and to focus. The heavy concentration of music playing occurs in an unfragmented present, distinct from the extended and disassembled temporal space of migrant life in a camp. But the very short moment of ‘musicking’ in which these qualities are felt differs profoundly from the long relationship to the ‘musical work’ on which the philosophy of music insists, comparing it sometimes to friendship. But the length of an encounter in a migrant camp is often too short for what we could really call ‘friendship’. The power of music is to create strong relationships, ‘shortcutting’ both narration and the time one would need in order to create relationships.
Why is it important?
One of the most interesting aspects of musical practice in migrant camps is that it is in itself a solution making a difficult situation in the present more liveable. Inclined to look forward to the future or backwards to the past, we might forget that this presence of music ‘in flesh and bone’ is given to us like the fulfilled promise of a new shared life. In considering such music a ‘present’, that is a gift, is quite tempting here: its presence is for researchers and for a wider audience an unexpected revelation of personal qualities in migrant populations. World music is more than the music of migrating identities: it is the music of identities being constructed. Music in migrant camps can thus be seen as part of this transformation, even if it means allowing little place for the real reasons for the displacement of the very people shaping these new hybridizations of music. In world music, authenticity lies in the path of the musician, made by the music rather than just making music (Labia 2017). It is also the music of encounters in the same way as it is the music of not-only planned interactions.