Voices and places: History, repetition and the musical imagination

This article examines the ways in which musicians participate in historical knowledge, through an analysis of the spatial metaphors that surround musical experience in two distinct urban locales in Algeria and Turkey. The article proposes an alternative to two approaches which have dominated the sociological and anthropological discussion of music: one which suggests that music simply reproduces social conditions; and another which suggests that it opposes them. Here I argue that the temporalities created through music constitute a form of engagement with experiences of time and history generated elsewhere.